On the Ninth Day of Christmas

By Francis X. Maier. In our house, we cling to the Christmas season like survivors of a torpedoed steamer. The tree stays up until it's a fire hazard. The carols play through the Baptism of the Lord, with an encore or two until Candlemas. We don't retire the crèche until Presentation of the Lord. Christmas anchors our year. One might reasonably ask why. It's a fair question. Easter, not Christmas, is the central event of the Christian calendar. And alas, Christmas now comes with a boatload of vulgar commerce. Some of it is entertaining. John Travolta as Santa Claus, hawking the Capital One card to the beat of "Stayin' Alive," is marketing genius. Television betting ads, not so much. Nothing says "crime against humanity" like a group of TV street carolers singing the joys of the Pennsylvania Lottery to the tune of " The Twelve Days of Christmas," while Gus the Groundhog - the Lottery's mascot - urges listeners to gamble away their paychecks. Then there's the weirdness factor. Who could forget the recording of those talented dogs that bark "Jingle Bells"? President Biden may want to pardon whoever had that idea before he leaves office. America's Litany of Xmas Oddities would be longer than St. Nick's naughty list. A neighbor across the way from us has Mary, Joseph, and the Baby Jesus on his lawn every night during the holidays. . .surrounded by a zoo of electric reindeer, grinning elves, and half-inflated Frosty the Snowmen. The intent is pious. The effect - regrettably - is rather different: a hostage Holy Family with Stockholm syndrome. America may still rank as the most "religious" nation among the world's advanced economies. But Christmas as "Christ Mass," as the incarnation of God's son for the salvation of the world and the joy that should flow from it, gets an annual drowning in noise and appetite. The question before us is why? Sometimes people beyond our shores see our foibles more clearly than we do ourselves. In 1831-2, Alexis De Tocqueville spent nine months in America doing the research that eventually shaped his classic text, Democracy in America. In 1988, the scholar Wang Huning did much the same. He spent six months traveling in the United States. Then he wrote America Against America, a sweeping cultural analysis of the American landscape. He's now the chief political theorist of the Chinese Communist Party and one of China's senior leaders. Wang saw America through the lens of a critic and civilizational competitor. Thus, some of his conclusions are biased or simply wrong. Yet his observations are both penetrating and instructive. Americans, argued Wang, "have no sense of history" and little interest in, or patience with, mystery. They're quantity-oriented, materialistic by nature, and highly innovative, which accounts for U.S. success in technology. They're also emotional, "especially in politics, religion, culture, and science." After the U.S. election circus of the last six months, all of this should sound familiar. Religion, Wang added, is a powerful force in U.S. culture, and millions of Americans are sincere religious believers. But many others are not. And that includes many churchgoers. Churchgoing practice and genuine belief don't always overlap because U.S. religion, argued Wang, often functions as an inherited habit, or a positive ethical code, or a means of social service, or a tool for psychological well-being without a vital supernatural core. This also sounds familiar. And it has cultural consequences, one of them being that "Christmas commemorates the coming of Jesus Christ, but the holiday has long [since] been secularized" - in effect, diminished - into a heavily commercial "folk holiday." Wang wrote those words more than thirty years ago. What was true then is even more clearly true now. It explains the Halloween-party skeleton with a Santa cap standing in a front yard just down our street. C.S. Lewis, who could never be accused of laxity or insincerity in his faith, had a special distaste...