Greg Craven The Australian January 5. 2025
Christmas and New Year’s are now safely past. The casualties have been counted and the implausible excuses workshopped. With just a touch of hindsight available, now is the time to ponder what on earth was going on. Every festive season you can guarantee a certain number of depressing articles bemoaning the loss of the real meaning of Christmas and the excesses of December 31. This is one of those articles.
At least it is not at the thundering end of the spectrum. I am not threatening eternal damnation to those whose idea of a Christmas card is Visa or Mastercard plastic. Although a warning whiff of sulphur might be salutary.
This extended complaint is more sad than fulminatory. It’s just that I wonder where the transcendent meaning of Christmas – and what management consultants would call its net positives – has gone. The whole Christmas-New Year’s experience is now packaged under a brand name, The Festive Season.
What on earth does festive mean? It is not a word in common use. We do not have festive football premierships or – God help us – festive elections. The word comes from festival, which means some great celebration. It is first cousin to the idea of a feast, but not just any ceremonial tuck-in. Our notion of a celebratory December is inextricably linked to one of the great Christian feast days, the nativity of Jesus.
Not that you would easily pick that up in these fallen days. Wandering about any of our capital cities over the past few weeks, you would think it was an extended industrial show for makers of tinsel and anatomically challenged plastic snowmen.
I do not want to be marked out as a religious crank – there is a long queue to do that already – but I admit to playing a sick little game every Christmas season. As I wander along the local shopping strip, which is saturated in festive decoration, I try to count the number of shops that show any recognition of the nativity that founded the whole thing.
These days my via dolorosa takes me down Military Road in Mosman. I have been doing it for 16 years now. Around 2008, about half the shops displayed at least some glancing recognition of the actual joy to the world. By 2016, it had fallen to about a quarter. This year, along the whole commercial heart of one of Sydney’s wealthiest suburbs, I spotted one small crib. Good on you, whoever put it up, but I suspect you lost custom.
I know that as an increasingly rare observant Catholic, I cannot expect everyone to buy into the whole reality of the virgin birth, the incarnation, the stable, the angels and the camels (my favourites). Mind you, it might be a sensible each-way investment against enduring the roiling fires of hell in the company of tedious unbelievers such as Tim Minchin and Phillip Adams.
But as a matter of common sense and imaginative intellectual capacity, it might be useful to recognise and celebrate the real values of Christmas, which are accessible to atheists and agnostics, alongside Christians and people of other faiths.
The first is hope. In a thoroughly fallen world, where people are taken hostage, shot and starved every day, Christmas stands as a bonfire of hope. After all, what crazy, intemperate God would send his own son to suffer for and redeem humankind. If he is that maniacally generous, perhaps there is some modicum of hope for us all.
Even to dedicated God-deniers, that idea that hope is unquenchable whether by torture, starvation or persecution must have some resonance.
But the less commonly remarked virtue of Christmas is its gift of reflection. In the face of the vast, unrepayable gift of the nativity, what have we done to reciprocate? Are we so very certain about what nations we revile, what politicians we detest, which family members we forget to invite to Christmas dinner? We cannot even aspire to perfection. But we can at least let it simply illuminate our own grubby lives.
This is not the shallow reflection of the new year, where we set ourselves improbable targets for weight loss or unachievable ambitions for professional promotion, all the while spending like a drunken treasurer. It is when we admit the possibility that there is some badness within us, are sorry about it and at least try to do better.
Divine truth, evocative legend or the world’s most famous fairy story, Bethlehem impels us to this conclusion, regardless of race, religion or politics.
The great apologia for modern Christmas is that it is a festival of family. We gather together in our perpetually strained clans, augment them with a few genuinely dear friends and drink ourselves silly while showering each other with bargain sale presents.
There is quite a bit to be said for this. At least it brings the crazy aunt from Quirindi into the fold, even if it is only once a year.
But empathy comes at a price – literally. We compete to provide and receive the most expensive presents, resent others’ limited generosity, strive to put on the best Christmas dinner and gossip about the inebriation of old Bill after everyone has gone home. I know I do. Then on New Year’s Eve we have a repeat performance, but this time with fireworks and enough alcohol to inebriate Godzilla.
The challenge is not merely that Christmas has become commercial, which it certainly has, but that it has become materialist. Not only was there no room in the original inn but there is no room for that translucent story in an orgy of turkey, reasonably decent wine and ear-piercing electronic devices for the kids.
All of which is odd in a nation that ostentatiously pines for the spiritual. Millions genuinely seek or claim to be seeking something beyond the commercial veil. But even this desire struggles in an age of mindless mercantile self-help.
How often have you been regaled by someone waving the latest tome on self-realisation spouting that “I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual”. What on earth do they mean? By definition, the notion of spirituality involves believing in something beyond the human world. What is it for these cut-price mystics?
Too often, it is merely rebranded materialism. I believe in human actualisation, as expressed in a perfectly formed body. I demand that the planet be healed according to my personal prescription. I am a mystic raindrop therapist.
But however misdirected or amusing, all these desires go in a single direction: people long for a spiritual reality that transcends mere functional reality.
This is one of the reasons religion is growing, rather than shrinking, as a world phenomenon. In Australia, as old, white, cynical Catholics are deserting the pews, they are being replaced by young, vibrant, committed co-religionists from India and Africa.
More eccentrically, an Australia starved of spirituality has begun to manufacture or appropriate homegrown varieties.
The more extreme versions of climate crisis are obvious examples. The concept of Earth as a sort of incorporeal moral concept is celebrated from the worshippers of Greta Thunberg to nutters who glue themselves to major traffic facilities.
But perhaps the most fascinating example is European Australians who attempt to colonise an entirely genuine Indigenous spirituality. They adopt and appropriate ancient practices and legends that not only are not theirs but that they would laugh out of any conventional redbrick church.
All of which shows that the desire of humankind for transcendence is ineradicable. It is a pity we cannot see it when it stares at us gently from a crib.
Greg Craven is former vice-chancellor of the Australian Catholic University.
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1/ How the ‘festive’ season looked at Bronte Beach on the morning after Christmas, 2024. Picture: Flavio Brancaleone
2/ Pope Francis greets the crowd from the main balcony of St. Peter’s basilica after the Urbi et Orbi message and blessing to the city and the world as part of Christmas celebrations on December 25. Picture: AFP
3/ Shoppers in the Pitt Street Mall in the Sydney CBD during the post-Christmas sales. Picture: Gaye Gerard/NewsWire
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