I Want a Dad for Christmas

Pastor Page, December 4, 2007

Television sets the tone of many a time of year, and at this time of year it’s Christmas, Christmas, Christmas. I was flipping through the channels last night—we have far too many, it turns out—and adjacent to one another on the channel guide were two with strangely similar titles. One was A New Dad for Christmas and the other I Want a Dad for Christmas. Talk about a family shopping experience . . . it left me wondering just where you go to pick up one of those. Is there a shop called “Dads R’ Us” or maybe “Father Nine-West?” (Get it? Father Knows Best?) Perhaps it’s a trend, and we’ll see follow-ups like “Grandma’s in the Kitchen (for only $39.95)” and “I Got a New Niece at Easter in Nice.”

Then there are the standards: in past years, at any given hour of any given day, you could find Jimmy Stewart wandering lost and alone in Bedford Falls—until NBC locked up the broadcast rights, that is. But Turner Broadcasting, which owns the rights to A Christmas Story, is more generous, so we can watch Peter Billingsley get told “You’ll put your eye out with that thing” until we’re blue in the face. And in Miracle on 34^th Street, John Payne—remember him?—will teach Natalie Wood over and over about the true meaning of Christmas (it’s Santa Claus and Macy’s, in case you haven’t seen it).

And then there are the Christmas specials—it used to be you’d see crooners pop up every year with their very own. Perry Como had one most years, as did the mysteriously well-preserved Robert Goulet. I guess it’s the dearth of crooners these days that’s done it, but maybe it’s also the tenor of the times (please forgive the horrible pun). We’re in a much more skeptical era, where the pleasures of hearth and home at Christmas can’t just be presented straight, or at least not without a huge dollop of irony. And what I wonder is, how’d our culture get that way? How’d our culture get so that it can’t simply enjoy the Holidays, without a nudge and a wink and maybe a weary sigh?

It’s tempting to blame that ol’ boogie-man “consumerism,” the trusty stand-by of preachers everywhere. After all, Christmas has come earlier and earlier, and the advertisements have gotten get more and more strident, so it’s easy to conclude that the season’s about no more than who gets what for how much. I think that out-of-control Christmas consumerism is just a symptom of a deeper malaise, a deeper disease . . . but it’s a disease for which we have the cure. It’s Christ, of course, whose birthday it is. Christmas is his holiday, and through him, it is ours as well, but we’ve ceded the teaching of it over to television and the movies, and the celebration of it to the department stores and the malls. The time when we can just sit back at Christmas and people will show up to hear what we have to say is over. We have a message to proclaim, and at this time of year, when the rate of clinical depression soars with the credit-card bills, it’s needed more than ever. It’s a message of grace and forgiveness or, as the angels say, peace on Earth, goodwill to all.