As I write this, Christmas is a mere six days away.  Last week I began in earnest the annual process of Christmas shopping and gift wrapping and mailing.  This tends to involve the awkward emails from family members asking me what I want for Christmas.  Leeman always compares sending a lists of Christmas requests to sending your loved ones a list of ransom demands.  There's something that's just a little unsettling about it, and it always makes us both feel a little awkward.

It's easy to understand the source of such awkward feelings.  We've probably all seen reports of the woman who pepper sprayed her fellow shoppers [including children!] on "Black Friday" in her quest to get a cheap x-box:

I think a lot of us rightly recoil against this example of "consumerism gone wild" around the Christmas Season.  in response, we adopt staunchly anti-consumerist, "anti-stuff" attitudes this time of year.  Now that they have been ejected from parks around the world, the occupy movement has, for example, decided to take on Christmas.   And I can't even tell you how many times this powerful, challenging image has shown up on my facebook news feed in the last month:

So, where does leave us?  We're all inevitably caught up in this cycle of gift-giving.  Do we just load up on the guilt as we continue to participate in a system we feel powerless to change?  Do we forego gift-giving altogether in an attempt to embrace the pure "spiritual" meaning of Christmas?

As much as I am deeply uncomfortable with the consumer culture that has us ravaging our planet (often by exploiting workers in the developing world), I cannot bring myself to view the gift-giving bonanza of late December as inherently "bad."  There's something about the giving and receiving of gifts that strikes me as so appropriate even to the "spiritual" meaning of the Christmas season.  When I was a kid, Sunday school teachers used to say "we give gifts to each other at Christmas because Jesus is God's gift to us."  That is a trite and overly simplistic statement.  But it does reflect a more nuanced truth.

What are gifts?  They are physical manifestations of our love for one another.  I love looking around my home to see the various gifts I have been given from friends and family over the years.  There's my hippo-shaped tea pot, my hand-made scarf in the colours of the liturgical year, and even my Dalek-adorned "count-down" Advent calendar (hmm...is it chocolate time yet?)--all given to me by people who know me and my sense of humor remarkably well.  And I love going on the quest to try to find the perfect gift for someone else.  These objects are more than just "things."  They are tangible signs of love.  We are just hard-wired to express our love for one another in such physical ways.  There is much good to be had in gifts!

And what is the "spiritual" side of Christmas all about?  It is the time when remember that God chose to reveal himself to us in a profoundly real and tangible way. God literally broke into our human existence: he took on flesh and dwelt among us.  Christmas is a celebration of the greatest tangible sign of God's love for us--Jesus Christ.  I think we would lose something remarkably important to the Christmas season if we let our fears of rampant consumerism rob us of the joy and the inherent good of entering into the loving spirit of gift-giving.

That said, the burden remains on us to stay sane and sober in the face of corporations and advertisers continually pushing us to BUY BUY BUY for the sake of buying itself.  The burden remains on us not to allow something that is at its core an inherent good become a means of exploitation, waste, and greed.

Maybe that means just a little more creativity--making gifts rather than buying them.  Maybe it means purchasing gifts from fair trade or one-of-a-kind craft shows, or simply supporting smaller local markets.  Whatever decisions we come to, I think the best thing any of us can remember is that--however stressful Christmas can be--our celebrations at home with our family and loved ones complement, and do not compete with, our religious celebration of the birth of Christ.