As I write this evening, I can well imagine there are a great many shoppers who are now home, exhausted from the shopping frenzy of the day, searching for parking spots, weaving in and out of the way of other shoppers in the stores, waiting in long check-out lines. Even though most all the stores have had Christmas displays and items out for weeks already, this day dubbed Black Friday has become the official kick off of the holiday shopping season. A great many years ago I did venture out to the stores the day after Thanksgiving like so many others and vowed never to do that again. I returned home bumped and bruised from getting banged into with shopping carts. Since that time I prefer to call this particular holiday shopping day “Black and Blue Friday”.
No doubt a great many people found some good deals on items on their shopping list. From the brief images shown on the local news this evening, the parking lots and stores were filled. One woman reported being hungry after shopping and waiting in line for so long (hmm…how many people go to bed hungry every night?). Another couple of people got into a “fight” (argument perhaps) over a GPS system and the store management had to call the police for “crowd control”. It gets me to wondering… Why do we put ourselves though all of this? What are we trying to accomplish or prove? Is all the excess spending really necessary to celebrate Christmas?
There are a great many people who are without employment in our little corner of the world, who are finding it hard to pay bills, put food on the table, afford the basic necessities of life, or do not have a place of their own to call home. Here are a few statistics I found today: Christmas shopping this year is expected to amount to $21.5 billion spent on electronics, $3 billion spent for gifts for pets and $145.5 billion spent on holiday celebration (yes, billion)! A few other numbers: 300 million children in our world do not even have one pair of shoes to wear, 3 billion people around the world live on less than $2 a day and over 100,000 people die each year from parasite infections (because they have no shoes). These staggering numbers of excess and poverty should give us pause – be a reality check for what is going on with our holiday preparations and with our sisters and brothers around the world.
As we begin this Christian season of Advent, a time of preparation, perhaps we can pause a while to remember and reflect on just what it is we are preparing for. Is it really that big bucks celebration or…is it something more – something much more valuable and lasting? The prophet Jeremiah foretold of the coming of one who “shall do what is right and just in the land” (33:15). An often heard comment to justify much of our excessive holiday spending is: “Christmas is for children”. Well, yes it is - for each and every one of us is a child of our loving Creator. As richly blessed and holy children, perhaps this year while we are going about our holiday preparations this Advent season, we will be moved to participate according to our abilities in co-creating a safer, more secure, just world…one person at a time.
Peace on the Journey.
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If "Christmas is for children" is used to justify my excessive spending, then : I better read aloud more holiday stories, enjoy more candlelit Advent devotions and CHEERFULLY bake and frost dozens more cut out cookies. These are what my grown children and I remember most about Christmas. Black and blue Friday we spent playing cards and eating sweets and doing chores at Grandma's. Thanks for your encouragement Brenda!
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