The day before Thanksgiving columnist David French wrote a piece that appeared in the National Review Online. The headline caught my eye, “For Reasons Good and Sad, Thanksgiving Is Now Our Greatest Holiday.”
French wrote about our Thanksgiving heritage from the Pilgrims to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. He spoke of the unifying power of giving thanks. Immigrant or native, young or old, creed or no creed, we give thanks. I appreciated his thoughts. His good reasons for Thanksgiving being our greatest holiday were good. But the sad reason, he said, was the decline of Christmas, our once greatest holiday:
Yet the very social transformation that makes Thanksgiving more unifying is rendering Christmas less universal, and sometimes more divisive.
After all, how does a specifically religious holiday endure when fewer Americans believe in the specific religion? According to the Pew Research Center, only 56 percent of Americans believe in the God of the Bible. So, for almost half of all Americans, Christmas truly is just another holiday — but it’s a burst of days off that carry with them some rather specific (and often quite expensive) obligations. Even for Christian Americans, while it carries the religious meaning, it’s also laden with secular tasks.
The last Christmas ever. It won’t be this year. But one year – we will hardly notice – Christmas will be no more. Oh, there may be trees and lights and toys to buy, but Christmas with any connection to the name it bears will have finally disappeared. It will simply be this odd bad-weather holiday of inconvenient travel and consumer excess. And we will still love it and then sleep it off like a bad hangover.
My guess is that when Christmas is no more, some of us will gather to worship the evening of December 24, but the service will be more like Maundy Thursday – deep and meaningful (yet this one filled with joy), a time of worship for the faithful alone.
The last Christmas ever. It is coming, and in some ways I will welcome it.
The last Christmas ever will not be this year. As it fades away, Christmas still speaks to longing hearts. It teases the curious, and from time to time some of those among the 44% of us who do not believe in the God of the Bible break through the tinsel wall and find themselves in a cattle stall worshiping the King of the Universe who sleeps in a manger bed.
Unlike the notoriously ungodly Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts uses its holiday coffee cups to give a nod to the fading holiday known as Christmas. “Joy” their cups proclaim.
The staff at the Dunkin Donuts near our house remember me for my once a week appearance early on Sunday mornings. I am usually the first customer of the day and they know I am a pastor on the way to Sunday work. South Asian immigrants, Christian faith and American culture remain oddities not understood. But for whatever reason they seem to enjoy having a pastor as the first customer on Sunday morning. We’ve talked about it for a minute or two once in a while. Who knows, maybe this year, before the last Christmas ever, I will say something – or do something (I’ve offered an apology on behalf of all America when I have been the second customer on Sunday morning and the first customer was rude and condescending) – to help them wonder about the joy their coffee cups proclaim.
See you Sunday