Tag Archives: consumerism

The Easter Mystery

Over the last few years, the Meaningful Chocolate Company has been selling what it calls the Real Easter Egg.  There are a number of features of this egg that set it apart from the others on the market.  First of all, it’s made with FairTrade chocolate.  This means that the people who grow the cocoa beans are being paid a fair wage for their labour.  Furthermore, their communities are being helped because the proceeds of a small premium added to the price of each egg are spent on a community project like a school or a well.  There are other FairTrade eggs, of course, but this is a good selling point for anyone with a conscience.

Secondly, a percentage of the profit is given to charity.  This is very rare, if not completely unique.  From egg sales since 2011, the company has donated over £40,000 to different worthy causes.  For a start, there are regular gifts to Traidcraft Exchange, a development charity which helps small-scale farmers and producers all over the world.  In addition to this, money has been given to Baby Lifeline, The Leprosy Mission, and Christians Against Poverty.  This latter organisation is a national charity working across the UK to lift people out of debt and poverty, offering free debt counselling through a network of 252 debt centres based in local churches.  You might like to know that Christ Church Ware is one of those churches – help really is “at hand” in these financially troubling times.  Buying a Real Easter Egg really does produce all kinds of ripples of good in this country and overseas.

But the third aspect is what makes this egg the Real Easter Egg; it has the Easter story on or in the box.  The company’s founder wrote recently, “When we first revealed the Real Easter Egg, I was asked by a journalist, ‘What’s Easter got to do with the church?’ I had to explain that Easter is in fact a religious festival and not owned by Cadbury!  This year, The Real Easter Egg radio advert was rejected by the radio authority.  They seemed unsure if Easter was Christian and so wanted our advert to say that our eggs had a copy of the ‘Easter Christian story’ in the box.  We argued the point and they have decided that, ‘on balance’, Easter is a well-known Christian festival.” 

But it’s less well known than it was.  In March 2005, the Daily Mail reported that just 48% of British people questioned said that Easter was about the Resurrection of Christ.  Two years later, on 3rd April 2007, a press release from Somerfield supermarket declared, “Brits will on average be enjoying over 3.5 eggs each over the Easter weekend alone.  But over a quarter don’t know why handing them out symbolises the birth of Jesus…” (My emphasis)  This was later corrected to read ‘the rebirth’ of Christ, and then, after consultation with the Church of England, a third version correctly identified that Easter celebrated the resurrection of Christ from the dead.

There’s no doubt about it; ignorance of the world-changing story of Jesus’ death and resurrection is increasing in what has historically been recognised as a Christian country.  Will you be celebrating it this year?  What example does your practice set to your children and grandchildren?  There are plenty of church events, and everyone is most welcome…

The Joy of Christmas

“Christmas-time is here, by golly,
disapproval would be folly,
deck the halls with hunks of holly…
Brother, here we go again!”

So sang the comic songwriter, Tom Lehrer, and I wonder how many of us feel the same way, at least sometimes.  Our nation seems to have a love-hate relationship with Christmas, and this, I am sure, is because of what it has become; an excuse to spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need.

The pressures applied upon us by society are subtle: “it’s for the kids”, or “our family have always done this.”  We must join in or people will assume we are grumpy old Scrooges.  Because marketing departments promote Christmas as a time of goodwill and happiness, to opt out of their glitzy celebration is to be a miserable killjoy.  Because they assert it is a time of peace, any attempt to expose the shallowness of that peace is fraught with danger.  Disapproval would be folly – indeed!  Our national Christmas celebrations are precious, and to question their validity or helpfulness is to walk a minefield of sensitivities.

And yet I would rather walk that path than by driven by malignant forces of consumerism, materialism and pride.  I too want to assert that Christmas is precious, but for strikingly different reasons.  Despite what the adverts tell us, and what we may have come to believe, Christmas is not primarily a time for families, or for making extravagant gestures highlighting the love we have for one another.  It is first and foremost one celebration amongst many which tell of God’s amazing love for us.

From eternity, God saw how enslaved we were to the whims of the rich and powerful and to our own foolish pride.  He saw we were living only half a life, encumbered by worries, facing an uncertain future and frightened of death.  And he stepped in to rescue us from that oppression in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.  Christmas is a powerful celebration of God’s first-hand understanding of what it means to be human; in Christ Jesus, God became flesh and made his dwelling among us (John 1:14).

By giving us his Son, God has given us the opportunity of real peace; not the “grit-your-teeth-Aunt-Gertrude-will-be-gone-by-Boxing-Day” kind of peace.  In Jesus, he has given us real joy; not the plastic-grins of sound-activated dancing flowers or the short-lived, hangover-followed merriness of alcohol.  In Jesus he has set us free to be who he created us to be; free from dancing to another’s tune, free to live life in all its fullness with him as our loving Father.

Now that is some Christmas present.  And worth celebrating.  As we make our plans for this Christmas, amidst the noise of the advertisers who would use us to make money for them, so God is calling us to enjoy his freedom.  Will we listen?

Freedom from the Christmas Beast

Has your credit been crunched?  This period of financial instability and austerity continues to have mixed effects.  And Christmas just messes with people’s heads.

I recall watching a news report on the way the crisis is affecting people in our region.  In this report a young woman was being interviewed about the very real prospect of having her home repossessed by the bank.  Her anxiety was tangible, but never more so than when she raised the immanence of Christmas; “I’m managing to keep up mortgage repayments now,” she said, “but I don’t know what’ll happen when Christmas and all its extra expense comes round.”  My heart ached for her, but I must confess my sympathy was directed not at her financial need, but rather her enslavement.

She was on the brink of homelessness, facing the prospect of her family having to move out of the home she loved if she were to default on her mortgage payments.  Yet her comments seemed to suggest that extra expense brought about by the Christmas season was inescapable.  In her head was what seemed to her to be a genuine dilemma; “Which ‘bill’ shall I pay – the bill for the house or the bill for the Christmas celebrations?”

Clear thinking about her situation shows there is no contest; the mortgage must be paid, and Christmas luxuries can wait – forever if necessary.  It would be wrong-headed to put them in the same category as essential household bills.  If the young woman truly loves her family, she will surely hold back from spending on turkey and trimmings until she has guaranteed they’ll be able to stay in the house into the New Year; far better to be housed than to have a new flat-screen TV and nowhere to plug it in!  Her problem is the strong message being transmitted by the commercial world; “If you love your family you will buy them ….”  It’s a lie, but it’s on every street-corner, and it has been carefully set up to resonate with our heartbeat until we begin to believe it and it enslaves us.

It saddens me to see the impact of this lie upon peoples’ lives.  The consumerist culture we inhabit is so inhospitable and short of compassion.  Market forces feel no sympathy towards the people they lead on, and ultimately their promises of deep satisfaction prove shallow and empty.  Christmas comes at a dark time of the year, and commerce, whilst promising light, often ends up adding an extra layer to the darkness we experience.

In light of the current on-going difficulties in the world economy, perhaps now is a good time to re-evaluate the way we celebrate Christmas and give a mind to what is truly important.  If we are in any measure simply slaves to the system, it is my prayer that we would be like those mentioned in Isaiah 9:2; “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light.”  The good news of Christmas is that in Jesus Christ, his only Son, God has sent us a Saviour to free us from all that entangles and liberate us to be what he always intended us to be.  This is something in which we can, surely, confidently invest.