A toilet for Christmas
With a couple of days to go, I've realized that I'm changing my mind about Christmas.
There was a time a few years ago, when I hated Christmas. Really hated the consumerism, the fake sentimentality, the frenetic whirl of December with its obligatory round of parties and celebrations and end-of-year concerts, the panicked gift-buying in which (largely self-imposed) guilt and desire-to-please led to the budget being blown yet again. I even found myself growing tired of the almost desperate cries of the churches to remember the ‘reason for the season’.
But I think the moment that marked the beginning of a gradual change in my attitude was when I received a toilet for Christmas. A toilet in Tanzania, to be precise.
You have probably seen the catalogues that contain Christmas gift ideas like this. Instead of giving a relative something they neither want nor need, you buy an item of overseas aid in their name—a set of blankets for a family in Afghanistan, a bullock for a farmer in Bangladesh, or (in my case) a toilet in Tanzania.
As much as I was pleased that Tanzania contained one extra amenity, I couldn't escape the feeling that there was something strange going on; something that didn't quite work. A gift to Tanzania is clearly a wonderful thing, and there should be more of it. But it wasn't a gift to me. So why try to make a gift to Tanzania look like a gift to me, when it wasn't? If generosity to Tanzania is wonderful and God-like, then perhaps generosity to me (or even the rellies) was as well. Why can't we do both, if both are good?
I began to realise that although there was some justification for my hatred for what Christmas had become, perhaps there was also something just a little bit life-denying in my increasingly ‘bah humbug’ stance towards all things Yule. After all, family togetherness, mutual gift-giving, feasting and joy—these seem to me to be wonderful gifts of the Creator, to be received with thanksgiving. And what better time to enjoy them than in a communal remembrance and celebration of the birth of our Saviour? It's all good, as my kids would say.
The world, of course, will always spoil and misuse the Creator's good gifts. Mutual generosity is perverted into greed and rampant consumerism; feasting becomes drunkenness and gluttony; joy becomes phoney sentiment; and the Incarnate Christ becomes the harmless baby of Western folk religion.
But that the good is overlayed with an unhealthy layer of lard like a good ham, makes it no less truly good, and no less to be savoured with relish (so to speak).
As First Things author Joseph Bottum recently wrote:
Just because something is sentimentalized does not mean that it is untrue—or even that we are wrong to layer it over with sentiment. The distaste for sentimentality begins as a rebellion against false feeling, but it finishes as a rebellion against all feeling. It starts as a plain-speaking person's refusal to be deceived by a coat of paint, and it ends as a rude person's refusal to use paint at all. It opens as a wise man's ability to point out the fool's gold, and it concludes as a fool's inability to point out the real gold.
So I am as grateful for the toilet as the Tanzanians undoubtedly were. It has helped me to start liking Christmas again.