Christmas lists: celebrate wildly & in moderation.

Shortly before Thanksgiving this year, my eldest daughter began the annual task of canvassing the family for Christmas lists--the suggestions for their preferred Christmas gifts. These lists are traded so that we can pick out at least one gift each family member would really like to have. Year after year, items on these wish lists tend to be severely practical--driving gloves, turtlenecks, handkerchiefs--but sometimes there are surprises that set us off in earnest search of that one perfect thing.

Although younger family members may not realize it, this family custom goes back at least sixty-five years and has its roots in the Great Depression. For most people in those days there was precious little money for Christmas giving, but the elders in our family were determined that the children not be robbed of Christmas expectations and joy. So the things we really needed and had to have--new sweaters, shirts, and socks--appeared under the tree, carefully and colorfully wrapped. And the things we should have, as well--books, pens, and writing paper. (We children prepared gifts, too, sure that the gifts we made--felt pen-wipers and napkin rings cut from cardboard tubes and covered--were just what our elders wanted and needed.) The pleasure, however, was in the unwrapping and the discovery of the gift and the giver. The joy was in the giving and the receiving.

We unwrapped carefully and saved the paper, just as we picked the tinsel carefully from the tree and saved it for the next year. Old habits die hard, and it was only a few years ago that younger family members firmly took the used wrappings away from those of us now the elders, and convinced us that it was all right to throw them away.

The great explosion of consumerism occurred, of course, between the Christmass of my childhood and the Christmases of my children and grandchildren. So each year I experience pangs of guilt about participating in the national orgy of buying and giving to those who already have so much more than they need. And I feel a halfhearted response to those who lament the loss of the real Christmas story to commercialism, and who launch efforts to "put Christ back into Christmas." But I argued this out with myself a few years ago as follows, and I think the conclusion I reached then still holds true:

All over the country the pre-Christmas rituals go on: sacred music concerts in cathedrals, ballet and pageants, bellringing Santas on the streets, shops laden with Christmas gifts. What exactly are we celebrating? A season of feasting, fun, and frolic? The greatest retail quarter of the year?

Those are not idle questions. Controversy swirls around Christmas and its celebrations. To the distress of many Christians, the original "Christmass," the birthday of Jesus, is waning from public view. Class-action suits abound protesting Nativity scenes on public ground and specifically Christmas music in school and community Christmas programs. One Virginia town, for instance, trying to respond to the American Civil Liberties Union, removed all religious references from its annual Christmas program. Out went the Nativity scene enacted by preschoolers and the Christmas message from the town's clergy. Out, too, went carols with any religious wording. "Silent Night" and "Joy to the World" were replaced by "O Christmas Tree" and "Frosty the Snowman."

In response, the choral society refused to take part in the altered program, partly on the grounds that Christmas music is part of our artistic heritage. And a rally of citizens met in front of the community center to sing traditional carols and hear the Christmas message in a counter program. In a pluralistic society, it is clearly difficult to strike a happy medium between the secular and the sacred, between believers and nonbelievers, but we have to try.

As for commercialization, it might be well to look at things more historically. Christmas was never a purely religious festival. Christians began celebrating it only in the fourth century. Even then it was primarily a "baptizing" of the prevailing pagan celebrations of the winter solstice. In pre-Christian Rome, houses were decorated with greenery and lights, and children and the poor were treated to midwinter presents. As Christianity spread, Christians linked such customs to their observance of the birth of Christ. Christians, in fact, became so merry that, in time, the religious aspect was overwhelmed by bouts of carousing and ribaldry, as Shakespeare's plays, among other testimonies, bear witness. In reaction, the Puritans banned Christmas entirely. Its celebration became illegal.

In this country, it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that Christmas celebrations shook free of Puritan restraints, becoming generally popular and public again, and, alas, according to historians, commercialized.

Yet, to those who yearn to "put Christ back into Christmas," and to those offended by commercialism, I want to say that all is not entirely awry. I think of the skycap who, as he helped me recently at a New York airport, called my attention to a Christmas tree. "Pretty, huh?" he said. "See, we have Christmas right here." The tree in that commercial space had made him happy.

So it is, I think, that although increasingly controversial and commercial, our commemorations of the historic birth bring to the hearts of many a joyful noise, a sound still connected in some subterranean, mysterious way, to the good news of that first Christmas.