We Need a Little Christmas?

The oldies station in the Twin Cities goes “All-Holiday” each year, and each year, like lemming clockwork, it starts earlier and earlier.  This year, way before Christmas, like closer to Veteran’s Day than Thanksgiving.  I turn it on now and then when I’m driving, and today, like most days, it did not fail in upping my irony quotient.

 The song playing was “We need a little Christmas”. The chorus starts like this:

            We need a little Christmas,

            Right this very minute

The song goes on to say (rather bubbly, as you might expect) that:

It hasn't snowed a single flurry,
But Santa, dear, we're in a hurry;

Aren’t we now!  K-Mart, like a lot of the Christmas vampires, is opening at 9 pm on Thanksgiving Day.  And it’s also opening at 6 am on Thanksgiving Day, so we can buy before and after we show our gratitude by eating mass quantities. We need a little Christmas? Apparently, we need a lot.

On a serious note, if you didn’t watch the latest Ken Burns documentary on public television, please try to see it when it comes around again. 

Face Book: The Dust Bowl: a film by Ken Burns.  http://www.facebook.com/thedustbowl?ref=ts&fref=ts

The film shows how human greed and lack of care for the planet led to a terrible ecological disaster. Over-plowing and over-planting tore up the natural balance of the prairie, and made what would have been cyclical drought into catastrophic drought.  (Remember this, global warming deniers).  That it happened in the Great Depression made it even worse.  Everyone suffered, but the poor took the brunt of it.

But there was hope.  There was hope in the families that stood for each other, and there was hope in the government programs that helped.  The Works Progress Administration (WPA) paid people to build roads and plant trees.  It was just a little bit of government aid that provided WPA jobs, but it was enough to keep families alive, and dignity intact.  Of course, some called in “socialism” in those days.

One of the survivors talked about the Great Exodus to California, and how families would pack everything they could into their old car or truck, and head off to the promise of fruit trees and work for all.  Because her family lived just off the main highway, many families stopped to ask for food on the way. She recalled that her mom didn’t have much, but she always had something to give to people.  Often, she said: “it was a bread and butter sandwich, but it was something.”

It was just a little bit of food, but it cared for a family on a journey from despair to hope.  It was just a little bit of food, but it preserved one of our greatest spiritual gifts: hospitality.

Pretty soon we’ll hear about the so-called “War on Christmas” again.  As if there is some sinister force—no doubt connected with socialism, or perhaps the Grinch—that is trying to keep people from saying “Merry Christmas”.  I think the War on Christmas started long ago, when we turned it into a shopping contest.  Read the book: Jesus was not a big consumer or creator of wealth.

Jesus was born a dust bowl baby.

He was an immigrant born in a strange land, and hunted from his birth.

He was welcomed by shepherds, who knew dirt and rejection, and who knew hope.

He constantly chose to eat and stand with the poor, women, lepers, traitors, prostitutes, foreigners, the sick, children, sinners—the most vulnerable of all.

Do we really want a little Christmas of the sort Jesus lived?  Or can we dream a bigger breaking in of a new order of justice and peace?

Instead of shopping at Wal Mart this  holiday season, why not stand with the workers there:

http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/walmart_strike/?rc=share_email

And if you want a practical way to utilize the gifts of poor people, here’s one place to start:

http://microgrants.net/

The Jesus I know is justice this holy season.  Our family will eat and give presents and decorate the house.  But we will also pray and work for those who deserve a “little Christmas”.

Be justice. Be beauty.

Patrick

My father struggled through the Dust Bowl and Depression. He rode the combine trail through the wheat harvest when the harvest was good, and worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps or CCC, another socialist government tyranny program.  Here’s a newer poem of mine about that:

 

THE PRICE OF WHEAT

What should wheat cost

when it’s planted by a young boy
plowing behind draught horses,
while his mother lies dying
at home, the cost of her last-born
son cutting the string that binds
death to family? What should
it cost when the rain stops and
the locusts multiply and the banks
fail and all manner of hell
is unleashed upon the land?
What would its measure be
if the boy grew hard as his hands,
the father cold as a cigarette burning
in a dark, dark room, the county
falling down around itself
and the whole country following?
What wars and devastations
would rise from its restlessness?
There is bread that is made to eat
and there is bread that is made
to sorrow.  Dirt, rain, seed,
hooves, time, hands, blood, fire.
Every day it is kneaded and left
to rise on the stove top, every day
we eat without remembering is
a sore on the tongue.  We are
the bread. Who swallows?
Who laughs? Whose pockets?