Tis the Season for Holiday Music, or: Why I Hate Christmas

Opening Sentences

In many of our churches, it’s beginning to sound a lot like Christmas. Which is a big problem. Because, Auntie Mame, it’s not even a week past Thanksgiving Day now.

To borrow a line from Chevy Chase’s greatest performance, “Where’s the Tylenol?”

Call to Advent Worship

I don’t really hate Christmas.

But I do hate what our culture has done with the church’s season of joy. And how many supposedly Christmas people seem content to follow along like little red and green sheep with their decorations and their music and their outfits, completely oblivious to the fact that the sole reason for Christmas creep is so it can be further exploited by retailers as they peddle all the crap we don’t need, don’t have room for, and will possibly be all the poorer in soul for owning.

The church’s answer for this, of course, is Advent. I love how Joan Chittister puts it. “Advent relieves us of our commitment to the frenetic in a fast-paced world. It slows us down. It makes us think. It makes us look beyond today to the “great tomorrow” of life. Without Advent, moved only by the race to nowhere that exhausts the world around us, we could be so frantic that exhausts the world around us, we could be so frantic with trying to consume and control this life that we fail to develop within ourselves a taste for the spirit that does not die and will not slip through our fingers like melted snow.”

Wow. The race to nowhere. It conjures up images of commercial Christmas, doesn’t it?

Holiday Homily

It seems to me that the church couldn’t denounce that kind of Christmas too forcefully. And as a church musician, I’m particularly bothered with the indiscriminate mass consumption of Christmas music. Oh, I don’t suppose it’s inherently wrong to bring out a few of the secular classics in mid December. Heck, I even find myself excitedly anticipating my first seasonal hearing of Andy Williams’ “Happy Holiday/The Holiday Season.” Even so, I think we can easily overdo that stuff.

But the sacred music of the season can be a nearly sacramental presence in our life, if we’re careful not to abuse it. And music has the unique power to add richness and depth and dimension and life to the Christmas cycle. But if we’re clumsy, if we don’t choose carefully, if we turn the work of the people into an sing-along of old favorites, the music can be a messy, blurring presence that is detrimental to the whole thing.

It’s bad enough that we can’t turn around without hearing some muddy, self-indulgent pop recording of one of our treasured songs and carols, but the contemporary American church itself so often chooses to show up unprepared for the inaugural Christ event itself by caving into our cultural appetite and musically rushing to the manger. Used poorly, Christmas music can undo everything, transforming us back into undisciplined, spoiled children rifling through shreds of paper and ribbon, hoarding stuff that won’t last.

There’s a mega-church in Houston whose broadcasts I occasionally listen to on my Sunday commute. Yesterday, the first day of Advent, before the Thanksgiving pecan pie had been fully digested, they had their congregation of thousands sing “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” apparently not noticing the glaring tension between the date and the final stanza’s opening line.

“Yea, Lord, we greet Thee.”

It was more than a little nauseating, and I wasn’t even there.

The words of the Apostle are pregnant with meaning, “When the fullness of time had come.” Among other things, it reminds us that waiting isn’t new, and it’s never been easy.  And as church musicians, if we want our music to truly serve the liturgy, we absolutely must wait for the fullness of time to come instead of rushing the season.

A Lingerer’s Litany

Use the self-imposed time of waiting for Christ’s first appearance to learn how to keep awake for his next.

Follow the Baptist’s (John, not Paige Patterson) call to repent, and practice being God’s people every day.

Rejoice, because the kingdom of heaven is so very near.

Ponder anew the beautiful craziness of the whole story, and how you wrestle with its implications in your own life.

So wait.

Wait for “Yea, Lord, we greet Thee.”

Wait for “Star of wonder, star of night.”

Wait for “Worship Christ the newborn King.”

Wait for “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see.”

Wait for “This, this is Christ the King.”

Wait for the holy night.

Wait for the happy morning.

And no matter what everything around you tells you to do, wait for Christmas.

And then linger there a little while, after the marketplace dies down, Santa has his cookies, and everyone else plunges back into the frantic pace of their de facto ordinary time.

After all, we worship because we’re shaped by the Christian story. Not the Wal-Mart story.