As I drove through the neighborhood after dropping my daughter off for a babysitting job, I saw a couple attempting to blow up a gigantic slide and bouncy house for a child’s birthday party. This giant inflatable playground in the front yard of their modest home almost looked comical because it dwarfed their house. I immediately started to think about the birthday parties my husband and I had thrown for our daughter over the years.
I remember in the early years feeling an immense amount of pressure to get it right. A combination of my own wounds and expectations propelled me to attempt planning events that are not in my wheelhouse. I am not particularly artistic or crafty outside of writing. I am the epitome of Pinterest fail.
One year, I distinctly remember trying to frost and decorate a layer cake for our daughter’s horse-themed party. We did not have air-conditioning at the time, and her birthday is in the hottest month of the year. I frantically tried to frost the cake as the buttercream oozed down the sides. I put a fondant cutout horse and gum paste flowers around the side as everything slid towards the base. I quickly put it in the fridge in an attempt to save it. The cake was a disaster, but delicious.
Christmases were similar in the beginning. I thought I had to come up with grand gestures and gifts to make it worthwhile. I quickly realized, with the help of my husband and a lot of time meditating on Sacred Scripture, that this wasn’t spiritually helping me or our daughter. She tore through countless boxes—which we’d tried very hard to limit—and often preferred the box to the actual gift. Now that she is a teenager, she barely remembers what people give her from year to year.
Our culture has created multiple generations of consumers who tear through gifts only to crave more and more stuff. It’s never enough. The societal pressure for bigger and better birthdays and Christmases has created slaves of parents and children alike. We have been bought and sold through marketing campaigns that convince us we must own the next best thing to find happiness. We have been manipulated into thinking that Christmas and birthdays should be filled with lavish gifts and expensive celebrations. If we stopped for a moment and entered the ultimate birth story, Jesus Christ’s, we would see a story that is the opposite of this materialism and consumerism.
Spiritual poverty is an essential aspect of the spiritual life that can only be fostered through a willingness to detach from material things and to seek a simpler way of life. This is not a sentimentalizing of material poverty. Rather, it is to understand that the goods of this world very easily enslave us if we are not careful. Each item we buy or piece of digital content we consume clutters our souls a bit more. We don’t even notice it because we are like frogs being slowly boiled in hot water.
The Lord came into this world in total poverty. He came so that we might have life in abundance, but the abundance He seeks to give us cannot be found in countless gifts and over-the-top celebrations. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t throw our best parties at Christmas, Easter, baptismal anniversaries, solemnities, and birthdays, but it does mean we should consider what best actually means.
Those who live simply or in poverty often experience a level of gratitude in receiving gifts that we who live in material abundance do not. There is something beautiful about the child who can fully receive a gift because they are reserved for very special occasions versus Western children who are constantly begging for more and more stuff that cannot fulfill them.
Christmas was never meant to be about going into massive amounts of debt and piling our Christmas trees sky high with gifts. Doing so doesn’t raise virtuous children. It often raises spoiled children who are incapable of sacrifice and self-giving. It also creates expectations that do not exist in adulthood. I have spent birthdays alone or working due to life circumstances. Not all of us come from a Hallmark version of family. Holidays can be complicated or not celebrated together. We set our children up for moral failure when we give into the materialism and worldly expectations of our age.
Children are beautifully simple. We are the ones who teach them to have unrealistic expectations or to be addicted to material possessions. They don’t need perfect horse cakes, bouncy houses, or a mountain of gifts. They don’t need a Hallmark Christmas. They need Jesus. They need to encounter the babe lying in a manger who emptied Himself totally in order to save us. They need the simplicity and spiritual poverty of Christ. They need to know they are loved and saved by Him, and by extension that they are loved by us.
It is our culture and ourselves who have put a tremendous amount of worldly pressure on ourselves. If we do not find the perfect gift, Christmas is not ruined. If the Christmas tree falls over and favorite family ornaments break—this happened to us a few years ago—Christmas is not destroyed. If the gifts are few or non-existent, Christmas has not failed to come.
This Christmas, and every Christmas, we should seek to enter into the simplicity of Christ. To bring our entire selves to Him. We can only do this through interior emptiness and openness.
If we stopped to ask our kids about their favorite part of Christmas as they get older, we will often find it is not all the stuff. The stuff is only the answer if we have taught them that material possessions are what matter. When I asked our daughter, she told me that her favorite part is midnight Mass and eating birthday cake for Jesus at 2:30 AM afterwards. What stays with her is celebrating Jesus in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and sitting in the dark stillness of the night, in the soft glow of candlelight, singing to Our Savior and eating a piece of cake in His honor. It is truly the simple things that draw us closer to Christ and to one another.
Let us enter simply into the gift of Christ’s birth. Forget the over-the-top gifts and stressful celebrations. Seek His presence and His face and all will be as it should be. Our children will grow as people and be cut free from the alluring addiction of materialism and consumerism. We will find that none of us need piles of the material possessions our culture is selling. All we need is the Christ child, lying in the manger, and the gift of time spent in His presence and with one another.
Photo by Clint Patterson on Unsplash
