Pretty clearly, we really like our Christmas heavy on consumption, and light on religion. Let us call this Christmas tradition the Orgy of Stuff.

It’s dark, it’s cold, and the wait will be long. The street outside the store is poorly lit, adding to the gloom. Some have brought sleeping bags and pillows, hoping to catch a few hours of sleep while they hold their place. And if the rain returns, they’ll get drenched. Still, there are hundreds of people in line, stretching around the block and out of sight. Why? Why would anyone endure such conditions? There are bargains to be had!

In the retail world, the Christmas shopping season can make or break a company’s annual sales. And in the United States, Black Friday, the day after the Thanksgiving holiday, can make or break a brick and mortar store’s Christmas season. So far, the 2017 Christmas shopping season looks promising. Total sales for the season are estimated to exceed $680 billion, up several percentage points over 2016’s total of almost $656 billion. But, of course, not all of those sales are coming in stores. Over the last decade, online Christmas season sales have grown by leaps and bounds. Initial online sales figures reported by Forbes magazine suggest a more than 10% increase in online sales this Thanksgiving weekend over the same period in 2016. On Cyber Monday, the online counterpart to Black Friday, 2017 sales were up 16.8% over the previous year, with $6.6 billion in sales, the largest single online shopping day in history.

These are big numbers, and they deserve to be taken seriously. They suggest that Christmas, and especially Christmas giving, is not just an important part of our economy, but that it plays an oversized role in our culture, nowhere more so than in our pop culture. It is not news to point out that Christmas season television and movies are absolutely dominated by the theme of gift giving, primarily in the guise of Santa Claus. A glance at the list of all time top grossing Christmas movies shows several versions of Home Alone, Grinch, and innumerable variations on Santa, good, bad and inept. While some of these movies do extoll the value of family togetherness (for instance, as an occasion to give lots of gifts), there is nary a reference to Christianity in any of them. The Nativity Story, the highest grossing religiously oriented Christmas movie, comes in 29^th on the list with about $38 million in domestic U.S. revenue. The first two Home Alone movies made almost $460 million domestically, over $830 million worldwide.

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"Christmas has never been a purely religious holiday, it’s always been a balance between the sacred and the secular." 

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