Category: Culture
Jingle Bell
The Oklahoma Regional Church staff held our Christmas party on Friday. It was a great dinner and conversation around the table. Following dinner we returned to Tom & Kay Jewell’s home (the Regional pastor) for dessert, games, and a Dirty Santa gift exchange that followed the story below. Apparently, this story is shared each year as party goers move the Dirty Santa gifts around the room. Enjoy!
Once there was a store that sold lots of jingle bells—and only jingle bells. As the customers came in, and picked the jingle bells up, the bells would jingle their best, hoping that they would be taken to a nice warm loving home. The littlest jingle bell had many problems. Customers would pick it up, and it would ring for them with all it’s might. “Jingle Jingle,” it would say. Then the customers would set it back down, and say, “this little jingle bell won’t do,” and they would walk on, and pick up other jingle bells. As the season went on, there became fewer and fewer bells. At last, Christmas Eve finally came. All of the bells had been taken except the littlest jingle bell on the shelf towards the back. As the store keeper was about to close down for christmas, a man with black snow covered boots walked in, and said to the store keeper, “I have been in my sleigh. One of the jingle bells has broken off, and I need a replacement before I can leave, so the reindeer can know where I tell them to go. The little jingle bell raised its head high as it looked toward the man. It was Santa Claus! The bell became very excited. The store keeper said, “Well, I have one last jingle bell, and I can show it to you if you want, but I don’t think that it’ll be big enough for your sleigh.” The store keeper led Santa to the back of the store, picked up the little bell, and gave it to him. He held it up in his hand, and gave it a little jingle, and the bell jingled with all it’s might. Then Santa said, “you’re right. It is too small.”
Consumerism v. Christianity
A Meditation on Shopping and Desire
Theology comes to terms with consumer culture.
by Michelle Gonzalez Maldonado | Religion Dispatches Magazine | Dec. 15, 2010I love to shop. This questionable passion led me to write a book on shopping. I will also confess, like any good Catholic, that guilt is a motivator here as well. Plagued by a consumerist culture that defines our worth and value by what we spend, yet informed by a Christian ethical vision that attempts to undermine that very ideology, I sought to reconcile the two.
While disagreeing with this particular logic, I do agree that shopping is an ethical act. Today we live in a culture of cheap. We have an unprecedented access to cheap goods, yet we must recognize that cheap goods are cheaply made. I am not speaking of quality, I am speaking of cheap labor. We must recognize that through the act of shopping, whether it is for an article of clothing, a toy, a pint of strawberries, or even our morning cup of coffee, we participate in a global economy that values profit over people. Disposable goods are made by disposable people, faceless individuals whose backbreaking and unjustly paid labor produce the goods we consume.
What we buy and where we buy it is a political act. It is also, I argue, a religious act.
If material goods define who you are and how you judge others, then you have a problem. If you are constantly seduced into buying things you do not need and cannot afford, then you have been seduced by our consumerist culture. The saying “born to shop” is not entirely untrue. We all have to shop; it is part of our everyday lives and survival. However if we truly “live to shop” we may want to take a pause, and sit this season out.