Yesterday, rather out of the blue, I was asked to write a column for North Central University's student newspaper The Northern Light. They had a writer drop out at the last minute, but I still felt honored to be asked. Here is more or less the finished article, which I think will be the first thing I've had published in Minnesota.
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This year marks the fortieth anniversary of “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” and though I don’t have a TV and haven’t watched the special in years, I have the whole thing more or less memorized. Of course, Charlie Brown’s angst about the commercialization of Christmas resonates with me more the older I get, but this year two things about “A Charlie Brown Christmas” stuck out to me. The first was those giant pink and blue aluminum Christmas trees that must have seemed absurd even in 1965 but reveal something about Christmas in general and especially about Christmas where I live down in Southern California.
Christmas may be the only time of year when California desperately tries to be like the colder parts of the country instead of the other way around. Wintry imagery abounds, even though there’s no real winter here. They’ve even rigged Disneyland so it “snows.”
Of course, this kind of transformation is expensive – and lucrative. I made some good money this summer hanging Christmas lights in the rich parts of Orange County. I’ve wrapped palm trees with red and white lights and strung icicle lights across the roofs of houses that have never seen a real icicle. One woman paid over $800 for labor alone, not counting materials, for us to hang garland and giant metal bows on the front of her two-story house where she lives by herself. For that much money, I figure she’s earned the right to brag about the decorations to her neighbors as if she had put them up herself.
I kind of enjoyed the work, actually. Maybe it’s all the biblical imagery about the Light of the World, and singing “This Little Light of Mine” since I was two, but there’s something about adorning a tree with thousands of tiny lights in preparation for Christ’s coming that seems rather spiritual to me.
But there were times, like setting up the six-foot shimmering metal holographic nativity scene, when I felt the weight of this most commercial of all holidays and wanted to rip the whole thing apart and decry the whole affair as belonging to a den of thieves. Would Jesus smile down upon a two thousand dollar light show placing a plastic version of Himself against the background of the winter solstice?
But lets be real – Christmas down here has never been about being real. Never was this more apparent to me this season than when I was hanging a fake plastic garland over a propane fireplace perpetually burning fake wood in a house that certainly has central heating.
That is the sort of thing that makes me yearn for the giant pink and blue aluminum Christmas trees from the Charlie Brown special. Even as a child the absurdity of them appealed to me – so aggressively artificial that you don’t even have to touch them to know how hollow and metallic they would sound. These days my family, like most people I know, has a fake Christmas tree that looks mostly real. I suppose it’s just as well, since it is cheaper, easier and not as messy as buying a new tree every year, and plastic is as evergreen as anything.
Even if you go out into the snowy woods and cut one yourself, that dead tree is still just a symbol. A symbol of what, I’m not entirely sure. A modern symbol of Christmas, but not of Christ. That’s why I liked those aluminum trees: they pulled back the veil of so many “Christmas” symbols we take for granted and revealed what they have become – manufactured nonsense.
The tree that Charlie Brown rescued of course actually meant something; it was the shabby, broken loser that desperately needed to be loved. Just like Charlie Brown. Just like all of us, actually.
And now you can buy a “perfect replica” of that little pathetic tree from Urban Outfitters! Or you could have at least. It was sold out as of this writing. Good grief, indeed.
The second thing that struck me about “A Charlie Brown Christmas” this season is actually something that has always bugged me. They hired actual children to voice the characters and at times they don’t quite sound professional. For example, when Linus is quoting the Christmas story from Luke and he gets to the part where the angel appears to the shepherd, he says, “and the glory of the Lord shone round about them and they were sore afraid.” He doesn’t say “so afraid,” he says “sore afraid,” which I was always sure was a slip of the tongue from a child reading too quickly.
But this year I looked up the passage. And the King James version, which was used in the special, actually does say “sore afraid.” The New King James version changes it to “greatly afraid,” but I couldn’t stop thinking about what itmeans to be “sore” afraid.
So afraid that you’re sick? That you’re physically sore? Fear that shakes you to the core of your bones? That sort of fear doesn’t sound particularly American – or Christmassy at all.
But the idea of the glory of the Lord shining around me, around this seasonal pageant of artificiality, this hopeless cycle of showing off, of constructing glittery religion from lights and snow machines – when I think of God in all his holiness appearing before this absurdity we call Christmas, I do feel sore with fear and insufficiency.
What hope do we have when we elevate aluminum rituals to the top of our altars and continuously come away empty, that tinny sound reverberating throughout our souls? Surely we will be condemned when we stand before the Glory of God … except, what is it that the angel says? “I bring good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.”
All people? Even those of us with sickeningly metal nativity scenes glowing from our yard? Even those of us who continue to put up “Christmas trees” even though they’re no longer trees and we don’t know what they have to do with Christmas?
All people.
xxxooo
