This year Christmas was a little strange for me. Everyone knows that things get a little busy in December. The stores get special stock and run crazy sales so that shoppers will come to buy Christmas presents for family and friends. If you are smart you do your Christmas shopping early so you don't have to venture out into heavy traffic on slippery roads and navigate crowded shopping centres. Well, I got to see the Christmas season from a different perspective this year, I was working e-commerce retail.
Between Black Friday, Christmas, and Boxing Week the call centre was all hands on deck nonstop calls with waiting queues of 20+ from opening till an hour before closing. The Source specifically hires dozens of new customer service reps on seasonal contracts and enforces a streamlined system for processing calls to meet the insane demand that December brings. Even with all the extra help and streamlined system we had to work extra hours and still couldn't keep up. It was like trying to hold back the ocean with a football stadium...
Every minute of every day at work was dealing with customers trying to find things, buy things, return things, and get a better price for things. The closer we got to Christmas the more intense and the more crazy things got. Customers began to lose their patience and became more demanding. Some were desperate trying to shave nickels off of already low priced items and ensure that it was shipped in time for Christmas. "Do you price match?" "is this guaranteed?" "do you think it will go on sale even lower than it already is?" and "Will it arrive before the 25th?"
This was the materialist holy season and the capitalist harvest time. It made me sick. Christmas is hollow without Christ. All I saw was desperate people pining after 'things' wearing themselves and everyone else ragged and tacking on 'happy holidays' to an otherwise exhausted and often frustrated goodbye. Advertisements, lights, noise, busyness, so much trying to grab everyone's attention all to the the sentimental tunes of 'White Christmas' and 'Santa Claus is Coming to Town.'
The noise and busyness and distraction were draining and as Customer Care kept telling us, "Customers are Crazy during Christmas." I wanted everything to just go quiet and dark and still. I wanted to remember the coming of Christ, reflect upon the then and the now, the already and the not yet, my life in the grand scheme of God's workings in the world, and how God's workings in the world is transforming everything. I wanted to celebrate Advent and was greatly missing how The Gathering (my church back in Caronport) would draw attention to the mystery and holiness of the Christmas season. What I got instead was sickness and circumstances that kept us from church and a mad rat race with cheese strapped to my ear at work. In order to get to and from the call centre you have to go through the warehouse. Every time I did I purposefully whistled "Oh Come Oh Come Emmanuel," and let its mournful and triumphant melody echo throughout the entire building for all to hear.
There is indeed something mad, insane, and dehumanizing about how we anticipate Christmas as a culture in North America. This year I was struck by the difference between Christmas as the religious holy season and Xmas as the mad baggage society has tacked onto it.
