"A student of mine recently wrote an e-mail to me in which he told me that he was going to celebrate Christmas but not its 'materialism.' I humorously, but seriously, told him that Christmas is, in fact, the very feast of 'materialism,' that is what it is about. It is about the goodness of material things, perhaps especially the goodness of human babies. The Incarnation and the Nativity are precisely those dogmas that once and for all refute the ever recurring Manichean tendency to look upon matter as evil.
The 'materialism' that we often associate with Christmas – the stores, the tinsel, the glitter, the hassle – is after all the other side of what it means to be in a body and in time. We Christians do not in the least object to giving gifts, to decorations, to understandi
ng what it is all about. We invented such ideas. Like anything else, there can be an excess, but in the very core of the idea of festivity, as Josef Pieper pointed, there is this sense of abundance and excess, of overflowing and more than we can imagine. The paradigm of this understanding is seen in its fullest glory at the Nativity, at Christmas. Gloria in excelsis Deo."
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