Getting And Spending

In the poem The World Is Too Much With Us, William Wordsworth wrote the following: "Getting and spending we lay waste our powers." This thought was very much in my mind as I accompanied my daughter Isolde on a rather arcane shopping expedition.

Now as attentive readers will remember (and which of you are not attentive) Isolde is a world ranked violinist of whom I am very proud. What she was shopping for was the sheet music for the first violin in Bach's Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor. This involved visiting a number of music stores in the city.  I never realized there were so many, albeit often squirrelled away in little cul de sacs and alleyways.

At each shop Isolde would inquire if the music were available. In the first three visited, it was not, but success was achieved in the fourth store visited, the dingiest of the bunch. All this took some time, for the proprietors were all knowledgeable where classical music was concerned, and at each stop Isolde delighted in conversing with them. This gave me plenty of time for reflection.

It was towards the end of November when this small expedition occurred, and a Christmas commercial push was everywhere to be seen. I thought this was way too early to be aiming to profit from a date a month away.

After all, the Winter solstice, the underlying reason for all the hoopla and rejoicing, doesn't occur until December 21. For much of our history, at least in Northern climes,  this was the time when the sun's light had reached its shortest light exposure. From this point, the light from the sun would increase, and continue to do so until June 21.

But you knew all that. Certainly the Church Fathers knew it*, and it was a stroke of genius to piggyback a major Christian event -- the birth of Christ -- at the time of the solstice.

All of which is to say that there is something very, very wrong in scheduling all this Christmas getting and spending so early. The motive, of course, is commercial success. The irony here is that the person's birth being celebrated, when an adult, took the time to throw moneychangers out of the temple in which they were involved in just such commercial success.

All somewhat sad, but I took heart from lines from another poem, a bit more recent than Wordsworth's, Dr. Seuss' The Grinch Who Stole Christmas : "Maybe Christmas. he thought, doesn't come from a store. Maybe Christmas. he thought, means a little bit more".

And there I will leave it.


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* There were, at least after the first Council of Nicea, no Church Mothers. Jerome and Augustine saw to that. The two saints, however, had much less success against the Virgin Mary. Even they couldn't win them all. -- LSS.