giving gifts
It’s been encouraging to me that over the past few years it’s become much more popular to decry consumerism during the Christmas season. Great projects like the Advent Conspiracy have popped up, encouraging people to step off the carousel of feeling like they need to go into debt in spending to illustrate their love to each other during the Christmas season.
I think it’s a great and beautiful thing to think about this and to work at taming the consumerism beast a bit. However sometimes in the midst of that I worry that we can also throw the baby out with the bathwater.
One of the key words that I’ve seen used in the Advent Conspiracy is “relational giving” and I think this hits home as to my feelings about gift giving. There can be wonderful opportunities to give relational gifts that still involve buying things for each other. Sometimes it means a family seeing that a relative is in need of something they can’t afford and taking on the financial burden of purchasing that item in love for that relative. This to me seems in keeping with the idea that we want to give not out of some sort of weird competition, but out of love.
Furthermore, I think that just giving a gift that isn’t necessary but that will bring joy to a friend or relative is an appropriate expression of love - one of the few our culture has. And I fear that it’s possible that in the name of fighting consumerism we avoid this sort of giving and accidentally chastise one of the great expressions that our culture has.
Where I tend to agree is that there is a push towards an incredible amount of excessiveness, and I believe that’s what we ought to worry about. Not whether we buy something or other, but when we go into excessively buying, when we devolve into purchasing junk that never gets used and only has but a moment of sentimental value. This sort of excessiveness is what I believe is being reacted against. But as we seek to fight this, I hope that we don’t miss in the middle of that the beauty and joy that can come from giving a gift to someone that is something they truly need or something that we know will bring great joy to a loved one. That sort of expression is greatly needed in our lives.
