shopping malls

What's the difference between 'Holidays' and the 'Christmas season'? Ask Amazon.com ...

What's the difference between 'Holidays' and the 'Christmas season'? Ask Amazon.com ...

There was a time, long ago, when it was easy to pinpoint the beginning and end of the "Christmas season."

In cultures linked to centuries of Christian tradition, the feast of Christmas -- the Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ or Christ Mass -- was on December 25, the start of a festive 12-day season that ended with the Feast of the Epiphany. Many Eastern Orthodox churches continue to use the ancient Julian calendar, celebrating Christmas on January 7.

Then there is the "Christmas season" for the whole culture. One big change occurred on December 26, 1941, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt -- focusing on Christmas shopping -- signed a joint resolution of Congress defining Thanksgiving as the fourth Thursday in November. That established an official starting line for the dash to Christmas.

By the early 1960s, the name "Black Friday" was attached to the day after Thanksgiving, with armies of shoppers heading to downtown stores and, eventually, the shopping malls that replaced them. This brand of Christmas opened with a bang, with throngs gathering before dawn to grab "Black Friday" bargains, with police present to control the inevitable pushing and shoving.

Then came the Internet, with more changes in the size and shape of the commercial steamroller known as the "Holidays."

"It's safe to say that Black Friday has become a concept, not an event. We have ended up with Black Fridays all the way down" the calendar during November, said Jeremy Lott, managing editor for publications at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and former editor of the Real Clear Religion website.

"Basically, we're talking about Black Friday after Black Friday everywhere, world without end. Amen," he added, in a telephone interview.


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New York Times offers flashback to sacraments offered by the priest of the Parrotheads

New York Times offers flashback to sacraments offered by the priest of the Parrotheads

Although I have lived in West Palm Beach, and I once saw Jimmy Buffett riding his bike near the ocean on Palm Beach Island, I claim absolutely zero personal insights into the philosophy and lifestyle of Parrotheads.

However, I saw a tweet by Ross Douthat pointing readers to an excellent New York Times profile of Buffett linked to the 2018 success of the jukebox Broadway musical celebrating his life. The headline: “Jimmy Buffett Does Not Live the Jimmy Buffett Lifestyle.” In a way, this feature by Taffy Brodesser-Akner can be read — I think this is what Douthat had in mind — as a kind of meditation on the long, warm Buffett obituaries that are running wherever Baby Boomers get their news.

At first glance, there is next to zero religious content in this feature. Then I took off my journalism-commentary glasses and read this feature through the eyes of the Denver Seminary professor that I was, briefly, in the early 1990s. Hold that thought, because we will come back to it.

Now, read this large chunk of the Times feature and start looking for hints at the role that Buffett played in the lives of his, well, disciples.

One day he realized that even if you were the supply, you could also be the supply chain. “It’s up to you to figure out how to take advantage or to manage whatever you’re going to do,” he said. “Margaritaville” was a hit in 1977. But more important, on that day, Margaritaville® was born.

He established Mailboat Records, his record label, in 1999. He went from making $2.20 per album to making $6 an album, he told me. He built his own tour buses, because it costs five times more to rent equipment than to own it yourself. He then rented out that equipment to other acts. And he took charge of his merchandise. He didn’t do it because he was greedy. He did it because he could do it better than the people who were ripping him off with concert T-shirts that spelled his name as Buffet.

He sold his fans quality, spell-checked T-shirts. He played clubs all over the country, but it was the crowds in landlocked areas that seemed to love him most. In Pittsburgh, he and his Coral Reefer band mates noticed that fans had started wearing Hawaiian shirts, just like they did, to the shows. One night, in Cincinnati, his bass player Timothy B. Schmit (also of the Eagles) likened them to Deadheads, the way Grateful Dead fans would follow that band. And so they were christened Parrotheads, just as a joke, but then fans began to wear feathers and beak masks to shows. “In their minds they wanted to go to the ocean,” he said. He understood he was bringing the ocean to them. He was no longer just a singer. Now he was a guru.


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Welcome to $$$$$$$ Easter: Lots of candy, booze and Jesus-free fun for half of America

Welcome to $$$$$$$ Easter: Lots of candy, booze and Jesus-free fun for half of America

Easter is, without a doubt, the most important holy day in Christianity.

Christianity remains the largest faith group in the world.

There’s no way around the fact that Easter is the celebration of the doctrinal conviction that unites traditional Christians around the world: “Christ is risen!”

What a downer. This is a problem for people who decorate shopping malls and make the obligatory A1 holiday photo assignments for newspapers. There is more to this dilemma (ask Google) than struggling to photograph religious rites that take place at midnight or sunrise.

But people love fun, food, candy, parties, greeting cards, etc. Businesses love selling lots of stuff. And, in case you have not heard, a growing number of people in the mushy, old-mainstream middle of religious life — in America and elsewhere in the Western World — are cutting their ties to organized faith (“Nones” and others) and moving into a business, political and cultural coalition with atheists and agnostics.

This is a big $$$$$$$ deal.

This leads to this totally valid — even if rather depressing, for believers — headline at Religion New Service: “Adult egg hunts and kiddie pools full of gifts: Is Easter the new Christmas?

So I want to ask a journalism question on this Easter Monday morning (for Western Christians, since this Holy Week for Orthodox Christians and other Eastern rites): What was the Easter art featured in your local media this year? Here in East Tennessee, the major daily featured GOP racism and Earth Day.

But back to that RNS story. Why call it “totally valid”?

For a simple reason: It’s describing Easter in a growing segment of the American cultural marketplace. The question is how journalists can feature this reality — while also noting the rites and traditions of, well, the largest faith group in the world.


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If ever there was a year for news about the quiet Advent season, this was the one

Here at the Mattingly abode in East Tennessee, the Christmas Tree is finally up and soon we will start playing our favorite playlists of Christmas music.

In other words, this past Sunday was the final day of the ancient season that, for Orthodox Christians, is called Nativity Lent. It is the second longest season of repentance and fasting on the Christian calendar, after the Great Lent that leads to Easter, or Pascha in Eastern churches.

In the churches of the West, the season before the 12 days of Christmas is called Advent.

In shopping malls and mass media, of course, the long, glitzy, commercialized season that precedes Christmas is (wait for it) known as “Christmas.” The debate is whether “Christmas” begins for Halloween, after Halloween or after Thanksgiving.

Thus, news consumers don’t see a lot of Advent stories. In 2008, M.Z. Hemingway explained why in a classic (read it all) December 23rd GetReligion post — “The war on Advent.” Here is how that opened:

Of all the seasons of the church year, the first — Advent — is definitely the one that leaves me feeling most out of touch with my fellow Americans. While everyone else is frantically shopping, decorating, partying, those Christians who mark Advent are in a period of preparation and prayerful contemplation. The disciplines of Advent include confession and repentance, prayer, immersion in Scripture, fasting and the singing of the Great O Antiphons and other seasonal hymns. I'm fond of "Lo, He Comes With Clouds Descending," "The Angel Gabriel from Heaven Came," "Savior of the Nations, Come" and many, many more. Advent may, in fact, be the best season of the church year when it comes to hymnody.

The season is marked by millions of Catholics, Lutherans, Episcopalians and many other Christians, but not only do you rarely see any media coverage of it, the media actively promotes the secular version.

Advent ends on Christmas Eve with the beginning of the Christmas season. In America, the end of Advent coincides with the end of the secular Christmas season/shoppingpalooza.

I bring this up for two reasons.

First, I wanted to let readers know that GetReligion will stay open for business during the next 10 days or so, but with fewer posts (unless there is major news to discuss).

Second, another former GetReligion scribe — Sarah Pulliam Bailey — just wrote a fine piece for the Washington Post that ran with this headline: “Instead of raucous holiday parties, some opt for a candlelit Advent season of longing and hope.


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Holy ghost in my past: How I blew my chance to explore the faith of the 'real' Santa Claus

Our own Terry Mattingly is no fan of the commercialized, mall-defined Santa Claus.

In a GetReligion post last year, tmatt asked:

Why pass on the beloved lie that is Santa Claus?

I don't disagree often with our editor (who is devoted to the St. Nicholas of the ancient church), but personally, I love the jolly ole elf with the red suit and white beard.

Undoubtedly, part of the reason is that I grew up in a Church of Christ household where we celebrated Christmas as a secular holiday, but not a religious one. (For more details on that, check out this 2005 piece I wrote for The Christian Chronicle.)

 

Last week in the Dallas Morning News, I read a feature on a black Santa who has made headlines this Christmas season.

Like me, the Morning News writer obviously believes in Santa. Her lede makes that obvious:

Although his job takes him to the North Pole and other faraway places, this Santa — the first black St. Nick at the Mall of America — would prefer to work closer to home. 
Larry Jefferson, a retired U.S. Army veteran, returned to Irving on Monday after spending four days greeting children and handing out candy canes at Minnesota's Mall of America.
While he said his time in Minnesota was amazing, Jefferson would prefer to keep his workshop in Dallas Fort-Worth, and hopes to one day open a winter wonderland storefront.
In the meantime, he has gigs lined up at the Uber office in Dallas (he's also an Uber driver), the S.M. Wright Foundation's Christmas in the Park at Fair Park, and this weekend at the Irving Wal-Mart.
Jefferson was chosen for the historic Mall of America job after Landon Luther, the co-owner of the Santa Experiencephoto studio in the mall, sent his elves out in search for a more diverse Santa, the Star-Tribune reported.

The potential — and unexplored — religion angle comes later in the Dallas story:


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Journalists (and clergy) fail to note that Schlafly won a political battle, but lost larger war

Journalists (and clergy) fail to note that Schlafly won a political battle, but lost larger war

You know that feeling you get when you are trying to think of a name -- a person or an institution, perhaps -- but you just can't get it to pop into focus? The hard drive in your mind spins and spins and you can see hints at the data you're seeking, but not the real thing.

Trust me, this happens more when you pass 60 years of age.

It's even more disconcerting when this happens while you are on the air doing radio or a podcast, as I was again earlier this week chatting with "Crossroads" host Todd Wilken. (Click here to tune that in.) We were talking about the late Phyllis Schlafly and the fact that she was the rare moral and cultural conservative who won a major political -- repeat "political" -- battle in the public square. However, she lost her larger war with the most powerful principalities and powers in our land. As I wrote in my earlier post:

... She won her battle against the ERA, but lost the much larger war with Hollywood, trends in public education and the all-powerful worldview of shopping malls from coast to coast.
Of course, Schlafly's other major accomplishment in life was helping create a large space for religious and cultural conservatives inside the big tent of the modern Republican Party. In many ways, she was -- as a wealthy Catholic woman who was Phi Beta Kappa in college and later earned a law degree -- a unique rebel against the GOP Country Club establishment that found many of her causes embarrassing (and still does).
This is one place where I thought the mainstream obits missed an opportunity to probe a bit deeper. No one is surprised that the left hated this woman.

Now, I was trying to think of a young, popular, post-feminist figure in American pop culture who stands for the whole concept that being "hot," "edgy" and even "nasty" is a sign of empowerment, if not enlightenment, for girls.

In other words, I was trying to think of Taylor Swift. Since I am old, what came out -- as you'll hear in the podcast -- was a reference to Madonna. Talk about embarrassing.


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This is not a news story! But, alas, we are likely to see more brews coverage about it

This is not a news story! But, alas, we are likely to see more brews coverage about it

It's the question that drives editors crazy in this age of click-bait media: Why do some stories go viral, while others do not?

How about viral news stories in which there is little or no evidence that there is actually a story to be reported in the first place?

I'm talking, of course, about the spew your liquid caffeine on your keyboard levels of media attention dedicated to the Starbucks hates Christmas story that broke out this week, after the usual craziness in social-media land. See the post by our own James Davis with the pun-tastic headline, "Red Cup Diaries: Mainstream media cover Starbucks' Christmas brew-haha." Apparently, there is some kind of pay-cable reference in that naughty headline, too, but that went over my head.

On Facebook, I offered this mini-rant:

Is it acceptable for me to be very upset that millions of Xians think that it's already Christmas and we haven't even started Nativity Lent yet? I mean, who runs their churches, the god of the local mall?

The graphic at the top of this post, passed along by the edgy and hilarious graphic novelist Doug TenNapel, says it all.

At least, I thought it said it all, until M.Z. "GetReligionista emeritus" Hemingway, now with The Federalist, went old-school GetReligion on this mess in a piece that ran under this headline: "Nobody Is Actually Upset About The Starbucks Cup. Stop Saying Otherwise." MZ did her thing, but then turned this piece into some completely different -- making it must reading for journalists facing the challenge of finding valid pre-Christmas stories to cover this year (and every year, come to think of it). Her piece opened with this summary:


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Concerning 'holiday movies,' 'Christmas movies' and the civil religion found in shopping malls

Concerning 'holiday movies,' 'Christmas movies' and the civil religion found in shopping malls

It was one of quieter moments in the Christmas classic "Home Alone," tucked in between the church-pew chat with the scary next door neighbor and the open warfare between young Kevin McCallister and the "wet bandits." Do you remember the line?

Bless this highly nutritious microwavable macaroni and cheese dinner and the people who sold it on sale. Amen.

As prayers go, it wasn't much. However, this iconic moment also featured an heroic America child making the sign of the cross as he blessed his food. That's not your typical Hollywood gesture, either.

It caught my attention and it also intrigued the conservative Jewish film critic Michael Medved, especially when the film became a (surprise!) runaway hit with a US box-office gross the came close to $300,000,000.

I talked to Medved about the film back in 1991 -- pre-WWW, so no URL to that full column -- and he told me that "Home Alone" was a perfect example of a typical "holiday movie" that, with just a few nods of respect for faith and family, turned into a box-office smash that is also known as a true "Christmas movie."

I've been interested in this phenomenon ever since and, this week, that served as the hook for the latest GetReligion "Crossroads" podcast. Click here to tune that in.

Now, there is much that can be said about that "holiday movie" tag.


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