Our son Matt was with Jan and me for Thanksgiving. It was a treat because we hadn’t seen Matt since he moved to Seattle several months ago. Having Matt come to see us was one of the best things he could for us during the Holiday Season. It was more precious than any “thing” he could buy.
Buying things is a big part of Holiday Season, but it’s never been only thing the Holidays were about. For Christians, the Holiday Season is a time to commemorate the coming into the world of God’s love, symbolized by the birth of Jesus. For the pre-Christians in Northern Europe it was a time to celebrate the promise of the renewal of life that came with the end of the shortening of days and the beginning of their getting longer. For Unitarian Universalists it’s been a mix of all of these things. Our Universalist forbears had a hand in bringing the celebration of Christmas back into church life, it having been forbidden by the Puritans who thought that celebrating almost anything was a sin. Our Unitarian forbears introduced pre-Christian customs when Charles Follen, a Unitarian minister who had emigrated from Germany, decorated an evergreen tree for his children on Christmas Eve. Unitarian merchants were involved in initiating the custom of sending cards at Christmas and Charles Dickens, who was a Unitarian, wrote the most popular of all Christmas stories, one that has absolutely nothing to do with religion.
In my own case, I particularly like Christmas having something to do with religion. Beginning in 1965, I began leading worship on Christmas Eve Services, although in one, I had to institute services after the non-traditionalists in the church decided they’d rather not do anything that felt so religious. But once we started having Christmas Eve services they either changed their minds, discovering they just didn’t want to come to bad Christmas Eve services.
I loved taking part in such services, so, it was hard to figure out what to do when I retired from the church I was serving in California and went off to teach in a UU seminary. The first year Jan and I went to Yosemite for the marvelous Renaissance dinner and musical that is held at the Awanee. It cost an arm and a leg to do it, but we thought it was better than spending our Christmas money that year on presents for each other. We celebrated Christmas the nest year at the Banff Springs Hotel, watching Santa Claus be sent off by revelers who believed he was a Canadian. Last year, we celebrated Christmas in Australia, in the middle of that continent’s summer, watching the largely unreligious Aussies trying to accommodate themselves to television ads featuring Santa and his reindeers. For the most part the Aussies shrugged off the ads, put on their swimming suits and set off fireworks. The unique thing about these Christmases was not only did we celebrate them far away from our home and church community; none of them was burdened by having to think about the things we should be giving to each other. The gift Jan and I shared was being together in a special place where we could feel the love we had for each other.
This year we’re in a special place, too, although I get to take part in a Christmas Eve Service again. I can’t tell you – although I guess I am – what a pleasure it is to be a part of a church community where people, in the spirit I’ve been describing, would rather give of themselves than dwell on things. Even at our auction, though it raised a lot of money, what was really valued were the chances we offered one another to be in one each other’s homes or take advantage of the skills we could share with each other. We also bought things, of course, but they were all offered in a spirit of generosity, no matter what they were.
In a book called, The Thing Itself, Richard Todd talks the difference between sharing out of a spirit of generosity and wanting to give or get things for some other purpose, like gaining status or feeling the power that goes with displaying one’s wealth. There is a lot that can be positive to the value we place on things, but that’s not always the case. Take the t-shirts people often wear. I don’t mean the plain white ones I wore when I was in school. I mean the t-shirts with ads on them – ads not for a candidate for President of the UUA, like Peter Morales, but ads for the company that makes the t-shirts, like Tommy Helfiger, Old Navy or the GAP. What it is that companies that sell such clothes are able to do to so “derange people” they are willing to actually pay “for the right to wear an advertisement for what they just bought?” I admit I sometimes get hooked into doing this. I have a whole bunch of rugby shirts covered with ads for the teams’ sponsors, even though I don’t give a damn for the Bank of Queensland or XXXX Beer.
My one redeeming grace, if you want to think of it like this, is I hardly ever buy a shirt, even a rugby shirt, that costs as much as one that says Tommy, Old Navy or the GAP. I’m a stingy shopper, who likes to boast about how little I’ve paid for something when I bring it home to show my wife. “I got this for $5.99 at Goodwill, less a senior discount,” I’ll tell her, even though it was $5.99, less the discount, for something I didn’t need. But there’s Goodwill right there on my side of the street when I’m driving down South Golden and I just know there’s a bargain to be had in there if I just look, even if, in a few months I’ll be bringing it back with a lot of other clothes I no longer need.
So, I confess there’s a bit of the shopaholic in me, even if I’m not the kind of shopaholic who looks for things in more upscale stores, believing what I buy will bring with it some kind of prestige – such as the prestige that goes with owning an expensive watch not because it keeps good time, but because of its label. Todd says that in recent years it’s become possible to buy an inexpensive watch that will keep better time than the most expensive handcrafted watch that’s for sale. “Yet people continue to spend thousands of dollars for what is essentially jewelry hiding a fatally flawed timepiece.” Todd goes on:
In 2007 the New York Times managed to put together an entire glossy advertising supplement devoted to The Watch. It emphasized that buying a watch was an act beyond acquisition; it was almost a curatorial act. As the caption to the soft-focus photo of a handsomely groomed father and son explained: “You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely take care of it for the next generation.”
This kind of ostentation doesn’t appeal to everyone, including those David Brooks calls “Bobos:” bourgeois bohemians. These are folks who, instead of showing off the “gift for frivolity,” that goes with label shopping want to show off their seriousness, They do this by always buying the best of whatever it is they need, believing: “Only vulgarians spend lavish amounts of money on luxuries. Cultivated people restrict their lavish spending to necessities.”
But even those who do this can get trapped, as Todd found out when he visited some wealthy friends on the coast of Maine. There was a big yacht anchored in a cove near their home. But it wasn’t so much the size of the yacht that impressed Todd and his friends; it was the helicopter on the landing pad on its stern. “From time-to-time the helicopter would rise, thwopping away at the quiet of the cove.” A few minutes later it would thwoppingly return. This went on for days. The owner of the yacht didn’t want to trouble himself by having to rowing to shore; so, he used his helicopter. This raised the ire of the Todd’s friends. They said they were worried about the effect of the noise on nesting osprey – birds they usually disliked because of where they deposited their poop. But what Todd’s friends were really concerned about was the fact that to get to and from their yacht they had to row. What the flying yachtsman was doing was reminding the merely rich of how very rich it’s possible to be.
Of course, not everyone believes that having expensive things will make them happy. Henry David Thoreau, who we usually think of as one of our Unitarian saints, said: “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.” For Thoreau, what was luxurious was getting a cookie from the wife of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who would ring a bell to summon him from his shack on Walden Pond after she’d finished her baking.
Other than the Emerson cookies, Thoreau tried to be frugal about everything he did while he was living in his shack, but even for him simplifying his life wasn’t easy sand and he eventually returned to urban living. In the spirit of Thoreau’s sojourn on Weldon, people get rid of their TV sets, but they keep their computers because they want to stay connected in a society in which people who can afford it no longer restrict their lives to what happens in their village. A person who wants to simplify her life by getting away from the bustle of the city sells her condo and moves up into the mountains, but then spends hours getting from her lovely home to where she works. Another person decides to stop shopping at King’s Sooper and begins to shopping at Whole Foods, but in doing so ends up spending a lot more money, which, in turn, they need to earn.
Michael Pollon, in Omnivore’s Dilemma, points out that buying at a store like Whole Foods may not be as healthy for us as it seems. A lot of what is sold in a store like Whole Foods actually has a bigger carbon footprint than things sold in a supermarket. And what is sold as natural or organic may not be produced in as wholesome a may as we think. For instance, Pollon found that the free-range chickens being sold at the Whole Foods near his home, although they came from a local supplier, often didn’t take advantage of the doors that were open on their chicken coops. Some of them had only a few minutes of free ranging during their entire lives, the few minutes before they were scooped up and were sent off to be killed. Pollon also found that there are products called organic that are no more organic than the unlabeled products being sold. That’s why we need task forces like the one we have at this church to help us sort through the riddle of food, as Nathan did a few weeks ago in his sermon and our Task Force on Ethical Eating will be doing at the Explorations time next Sunday.
No matter what we eat, a simplified life calls not only shopping for the right kind of things, it calls for cutting down on our consumption. But cutting down is hard because we live in a society in which we’re told that the way to be a good American is to buy more things, whether we need them or not. We’re told that the prophets of old, like John Kenneth Galbraith, who wrote The Affluent Society, were wrong when they warned against over-consumption. Instead, we should be listening to the same pundits who told us accumulating a lot of debt is what it means to be a good American. We were being un-American, we were told, if we listen to Lefties, like Karl Marx, who wrote: “the more you have the greater is your alienated life.” The irony is that even those who may want to throw up when they hear someone like Glenn Beck don’t want to do a whole lot to simplify their lives.
Most people, and I include myself, like being able to have the kind of things we like, even though they may not have any long-term utility for us. As Todd puts it, while Americans “revel in stuff” when we no longer have any use for it we don’t just get rid of it; “we replace it with more stuff.” George Santayana once said: “Americans love junk.” But, he went on: “It is not the junk that bothers me. It’s the love.” The fact is that more than valuing the things they buy, there are a lot of people who just like to shop. They like the feeling of power that goes with the ability to say, no matter what: “I like that, so I think I’ll get it.”
Such an attitude is often the brunt of jokes and we often assail ourselves “for being the most materialistic culture on earth,” Though they may want to have them, people often end up having mixed feelings about the things they buy. Todd says that though we might like the things we purchase, there is: “something in us hates them, too.” “That’s the nasty secret behind the shoddiness of so much we buy.” We want “to break it and get it dirty and wear it out” so we can “throw it away.” But after we do we want something to replace it. “We are like the uneasy smokers” who “throw their cigarettes to the ground after a few puffs.” It seems as though it’s not the smoking that brings them pleasure. “It is the lighting up.”
What this suggests is that if we’re going to acquire things they should be precious to us, rather than being things we can just throw away as though they have no meaning for us. I think about this every time I watch a television reporter interviewing people whose house has just burned down, as they love doing on the evening news. The people stand there with tears in their eyes looking at the rubble. The reporter then invariably asks a question about how they feel about what’s happened that gets a tearful answer: “It’s only things. Things can be replaced.” It’s true. Things can be replaced. But shouldn’t the things we lose in lose in something like a fire be precious enough to us so that when we lose them we mourn their loss?
Take the stool Todd threw away when he was cleaning out the house of an elderly neighbor who was leaving her home of many years to move into an extended care facility. When she found out what he’d done, she was upset, saying: “But we used to play choo-choo with that stool.” It didn’t matter to her that it was 80 years ago when she played choo-choo with the stool. Connected to it were memories of a time when she was happy – which made her happy, now, thinking about it. Things can have more value than what’s apparent. They can be invested with a meaning that makes them special.
But even though we have things that are special, there are a lot of things in our lives that don’t have such meaning. In a book called Enough John Naish, a British author, says that, for all of us, no matter what we have or don’t have, the time comes when we have enough – and the same is true for our country. As Naish puts it: “In our Western World, material life is pretty much as good as it can get. So, there is no point in chasing more. From here on in, we will just be bringing our own wasps to the picnic.” Naish believes it’s time to be grateful for what we have and to say, if something isn’t going to be precious to us, we should behave as though we have enough.
I know we’re approaching a time when there are going to be a lot of stories in newspapers and on television rating the success of the Holiday Season on the number of things people buy. But the true success of the coming Season won’t depend on how much we spend or on how much we love spending it. It will depend on the generosity out of which we give and the concern for others that makes our giving precious. If the giving and getting in which we engage doesn’t have this spirit in it – it’s time to say enough and to let a more personal kind of generosity take hold of this Season.
Let’s remember this as we move into a season commemorating the coming of love into the world and the renewal of life that comes with it. The Holiday Season is a wonderful time when we let the right kind of spirit move within it.
Reading:
When I was a very young man, I bought myself a leather briefcase. I have it now, though I seldom use it. It’s right there on the other side of the office, beneath a table. Not just a briefcase, but an English leather briefcase whose lid overlaps the sides. It’s a true “attaché case” as they used to say, and suggestive of John Foster Dulles’s State Department or the British M15. But when I bought it I was neither a diplomat nor a spy; I was a very junior editor at a magazine. The briefcase cost an appalling percentage of my annual salary. It earned me some ridicule from those closest to me.
Then one day, I left it open on a table at home and the cat used it for a litter box. This gave no little delight to those who had thought the briefcase pretentious in the first place. Luckily the briefcase was thick with manuscripts, all far less valuable to me than the stylish case in which I carried them (thought I suppose their authors would have seen things differently), and it escaped serious harm. There were in the end some awkward letters to write. It is always a good deed to be a figure of fun, but the episode further eroded the pleasure I took from this extravagant purchase.
Yet you know, I still think my dusty briefcase is the very archetype of its class of thing. And perhaps, since the price for such an item has gone up impossibly, I can think of it as an investment, though in truth it was an investment only in status. When I see it all, when it emerges from the shadows of familiarity, I look at it with a fond melancholy, a sadness of the young fellow who thought he needed this emblem to sustain his identity in the world.