Flashback -- American Xmas is "fake," so deal with it

A sequel to Conan O'Brien and his struggles with meaningless Christmas decorations

My favorite book of all time — I read it every year during Great Lent — is “The Great Divorce” by C.S. Lewis.

It’s an extended parable about people who can, in the next life, take a bus from hell to heaven. They can stay, but that would require surrendering whatever grievance or sin caused them to choose hell in the first place. This is agonizing stuff. In one episode, an angry mother comes to heaven to see her child who died young. She wants to take him back to hell with her.

A crucial concept in the book is that there are many higher angels in life. But the higher and more nobel the angel, the lower and more powerful the demon it becomes if it falls. Here is a crucial quote: “There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.”

Why bring this up? I have continued to ponder that Conan O’Brien podcast that I wrote about the other day in this post: Conan struggles with his Holiday decoration emotions — Thinking about the challenges of celebrating a totally family centered (and cultural) Christmas.” In that YouTube, he shares his sadness about the fact that the festive, over-the-top decorations link to The Holidays (with a big “H”) no longer bring him joy, now that his children have grown up.

The Mattinglys of East Tennessee have never stressed Christmas decorations, in part because we are Easter Orthodox Christians and strive to embrace the quiet, reflective traditions of Nativity Lent. The decorations come out when we reach the great 12-day season of Christmas. In that previous post, I drew this from a recent retreat that I led at our local parish:

I separated “Christmas decorating” from “special Christmas decorating.” In our family, that has been the difference between the tree going up, with minimal decorations, and the wave of religious and personal ornaments and symbols that we add — when family arrives — during the final two days before December 25 and the start of the 12-day season.

Once again, that’s Christmas and family — sort of what Conan is talking about. But these small, family rites are also explicitly linked to the liturgical calendar and our faith.

Is that elitist? Is that simply STRANGE?

I am not saying that I am advocating being a grim Orthodox Grinch or Pharisee that stands on a street corner shouting at folks who dive into the American Christmas before Thanksgiving or even Halloween. Nevertheless, I will confess that the O’Brien video left me thinking about the downside of a bright, glittering, festive secular approach to The Holidays.

In other words, tinsel is not the real thing.

During these reflections, I remembered an amazing book that I read back in 2009 about the many Americans who attempt to mix the Go-For-It commercial rites of American Christmas with a sincere observance of Christmas as a Christian holiday, in the modern megachurch style.