I have a complicated relationship with seasonal Christmas shops. I’ll bet a lot of us do.
It began in the 1990s. Like most adolescents, I developed a contrarian streak when it came to the elders’ sacred cows. December rituals around Christmas Tree Shops (or their copycats) were no exception.
I had a lot of reasons for disdaining these temples of holiday glitz. First, I didn’t like the consumerist frenzy they aroused in some of my older family members; with their immersive salesmanship and their artificially deep discounts, they were like crack for the Midwestern shopping addict. Second, I resented what felt like the falsity of the whole enterprise. There was no reverence for the “real meaning” of Christmas here – only a cunning ability to gin up desire.
And mostly, I found the merchandise itself gaudy and tasteless. Doll-like faces that looked pretty from a distance were creepy and off-kilter at close range. The majestic robes of treetop angels disintegrated into sparkling, threadbare napkins on closer inspection. And everything was covered with prickly glitter that shed in little clouds at the slightest touch.
The actual Christmas Tree Shop chain (a subsidiary of Bed, Bath and Beyond) filed for bankruptcy in 2023 after a more than 50-year run. But the store wasn’t the first of its kind, and it won’t be the last. Tourist towns across both the U.S. and Europe feature year-round Christmas shops, many with almost identical stocks of themed Nutcracker sculptures, resin Nativity scenes, wind-up snow-globes and Victorian Santas. Even in the little agricultural town where I was born, whose small businesses were long ago destroyed by Wal-Mart, a locally-owned Christmas shop stands sentinel on the abandoned town square.
A Christmas shop is not just a vendor – it’s an experience. And when I visited my hometown this December, I think I finally understood the role it has come to play. Maybe in the 1990s and early aughts Christmas shops were manifestations of consumerist excess, but today, they’re more like fleeting, incandescent outposts of the numinous – in a clunky way, yes, but often in deadly earnest. Whether they know it or not, they exist to sate the soul.
A generation ago, hometowns like mine were pleasantly booming, their quaint, turn-of-the-century squares lined with shops and little hotels. The local population was big enough to field sporadically successful sports teams and respectable marching bands. On warm spring nights, teenagers gathered on the courthouse lawn playing music from boom boxes, laughing into the night. Local churches, also, were thriving, with huge youth groups and rigorous programs of mission trips (locally and abroad), Bible classes and charity drives. Things were still “high touch,” then, and there was significant pride in one’s community.
There was a horizon to look to, back in those days. Something to aim for, and a hope for better things to come.
Today, for many people, that horizon has been replaced by a concrete wall. It’s hard to see what to aim for. In my own hometown, the economic havoc wrought by the “big box” stores (and later Amazon) has been accompanied by factory closures, waves of drug abuse, and also more complicated, interpersonal things. Among my generation (now 25 years out from high school), I observe strikingly high rates of divorce, unwanted singleness, childlessness and generational estrangement – not to mention almost complete abandonment of the churchgoing habit. The sad stories keep unfolding. There are many reasons for this decline in fortune and morale, and the news isn’t exclusively bad. But suffice it to say: there is no horizon. Maybe the concrete wall has cracks, but they admit precious little light.
And that’s where the Christmas shop comes in. Step inside the door, and you’re surrounded by warmth and comfort. The very air glitters. Shining trees line your path like silent protectors, and the lure of beautiful music and mysterious, crepuscular light beckons you further in.
Here, here is the horizon. Even if it is only a theatrical one. And who said theater couldn’t be real? The transcendent, after all, can’t be captured – it can only be evoked. In holy theater, the numinous pushes through, or toward, like a beautiful form behind a glittering veil, always covered but always reaching in waves and swells and tantalizing protrusions, withdrawing before you can grasp it. This was always the appeal of the Christmas shop, whether we knew it or not. It pushed buttons of “spectacle,” yes, but also of mysterious sanctity.
And then there are the faces everywhere – the indulgent, white-bearded faces with smiling eyes. Some of them are on plaster figures dressed in velvet. Some glimmer from glassy orbs. Others look out from wooden panels, painted in oils. They are all reminiscent of the Santa Claus invented by Thomas Nast and Clement Moore, but aren’t they really God your Father?
Aren’t they, really?
Aren’t they really that tempered Zeus, no longer a hurler of lighting but the Abba of Jesus, loving and ineffable, gathering Himself behind the veil of matter to make you know Him?
Does He not seize upon every chance to enchant that which resembles Him (even dimly) and coax it into a breadth, richness and complexity that kindles discovery? Is He not the One we always knew, but whose form we must make for ourselves in the medium of our own bodies (and tools and imaginations) as ones who dream and self-discover in lurches of incarnational inspiration?
Is he not there watching, always? And was He not the horizon all along?
The Christmas shop, it seems, is a discount church with a low-cost faith, and its visitors are unconscious worshippers, surrounding themselves with effigies of their God and His angels. Upon this He looks indulgently, I think, crediting us with an unwitting righteousness.
And the angels laugh at the childlike naïveté of it all, I think. But they are glad we begin to trade (at last) a confident immanence for even a tacky sort of transcendence.
Maybe, in the smashing of material hopes, we can remember (with ancestral memory) what it was like to be true heroes of the spirit: Grail questers, life-donors, cheerfully ascetic, eyes to the skies and beyond.
We have been gluttons in these last decades, when even many “poor” lived better than medieval princes. But the form our gluttony takes – even that – points to a higher longing.
May we at last, in reckless abandonment, run after it.
