Halloween wasn’t even over when I received my first “Countdown to Black Friday” notice from all manner of insidious sources. Since I hide my darker side from public view fairly well, you might think I’m a pretty nice person, but I confess to a flood of peeved thoughts, none of which involved anything that would put my salvation in jeopardy, but might prompt the Spirit to jab me with his long pointy conviction stick. I really try to avoid that stick with acrobatic stealth.

It’s not so much about “leaving Jesus out of his own party” thing that irritates me most. I admit I really don’t like that most stores and Christmas decor substitutes the manger with a sleigh, but since I have no problem remembering whose birthday it is and since I don’t expect people who claim no allegiance to Jesus to bake him a cake or give him presents, I’m fairly cool with the whole yuletide scene. I experience my share of warm feelings derived from ornamented pines and chestnuts by open fires – although my apartment’s gas heater doesn’t produce the same effect. To be honest, I don’t much like chestnuts, but you know what I mean.

What does actually irk me are the retailers and economists who try to frame it as a moral imperative for me to drag our economy out of its doldrums by buying bigger and better stuff for all my relatives, including shirt tail cousins whom I’ve never met. The ones I have met, the media implies, would love me more if I sent them another coaster set. Unless, that is, they dislike me all the more for how my generous gift piles on to their guilt for not having purchased something for me. 

It’s the self-indulgent and rampant waste of time and money when there are people in the world who need a meal more than I need another paperweight to which I seriously object. I’m bone tired of hearing that it’s my civic duty to spend, spend, spend while people die around the world for a shortage of clean water, for treatable diseases, or at the hand of insanely greed-driven traffickers taking advantage of the vulnerably impoverished. Plus, who knows how many of the goods we consumers buy at Christmastime at cheap prices are produced by people in inhumane working conditions. By the way, does the word “consumer” bother anyone else but me? What or who is being consumed by whom?

A Wall Street banker named Paul Mazur back in 1927 said: “We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things even before the old have been entirely consumed… Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.” I think the shift has been pretty much made, don’t you?

OK, it’s obvious I have some serious therapy needs about the holidays in general. Nevertheless, on a less neurotic level, I do feel strongly about the irony of how generous we can be at Christmastime with our relatively well-off friends and family and be so miserly when it comes to the truly needy of the world.

If all Christians lived out Jesus’ commands to live simply and care sacrificially for their poor brothers and sisters, there would be much less poverty in the world. Poverty exists not because God does not care but because we do not. It exists because we continually edit out large chunks of the divine story that we don’t want to respond to. Our efforts to see God’s kingdom come will always be imperfect. But we will never know what can be done until we get out of our Sunday morning seats and try.   Derek Engdaul

Both poverty and consumerism dehumanize. Through his Church, Jesus can answer both and humanize us again.

And if you must shop for the deals of the century on Black Friday, be good Christians and don’t hurt the other shoppers.