First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

We Have Need of Gifts

I will always have a soft spot in my heart for Avon ladies. They say it takes a whole village to raise a child, and when I was in grade school, Joyce Butler, the Avon lady on our block, was a part of that village for me. Every autumn she would give me a holiday catalog, which I would spend hours poring over, selecting from among the pages of lovely things, appropriate Christmas gifts for the members of my family. There were bottles of bubble bath in the shape of superheroes, that could become toys after the product was consumed. There was aftershave in a clear glass model of a train engine, and tiny crystal flagons of assorted perfume on their own tray. I paid some attention to the price, but more important was selecting the most fitting tribute to each of my parents and siblings. Once I arrived at my determinations, I took the catalog back to Mrs. Butler, told her what I wanted, and gave her whatever money I had on hand at that moment. The interesting thing is that I have no memory of the amounts involved in these transactions. She would then order the items, and I would periodically, when I remembered, bring her some more money. When the packages arrived, she gave them to me, and I snuck them into the house and under my bed, where I gloated over them during the weeks leading up to Christmas, until I eventually wrapped them and put them under the tree. I continued to take her offerings out of my weekly allowance, until she told me that it was all paid for; it seems to me that it was sometimes after Christmas and into the new year before this was accomplished.

Now, like many of the born skeptics in this crowd, I never had any faith in Santa Claus as a real life character; it seems to me that I always knew that the true authors of Christmas were my parents, and other relatives, and the church. While I was happy to receive the presents that were given to me, the real excitement of Christmas Eve – which, as good Scandinavians, was when we opened our packages – was not what I got, but watching as people opened the presents I had selected for them. Mrs. Butler, the Avon Lady cum credit company, enabled me to maintain complete secrecy and surprise as well as financial independence from my parents in this enterprise, an ability that I valued enormously. And while I have graduated from the Avon catalog, it remains the case ever since, and up to this day, that the most gratifying part of Christmas for me is finding and giving the right gift; seeing someone else’s eyes light up with pleasure and surprise.

Perhaps because of this predilection, it has never puzzled me at all, as some people wonder, why an agnostic humanist would celebrate Christmas. It has always been clear to me that neither Santa nor Jesus is in truth the reason for the season. In point of fact, the season, strictly speaking, arises out of the earth’s orbit and rotation in the solar system, and it would come whether anybody thought about Jesus or not. And the pleasure of giving and receiving gifts is older even than human society, and certainly predates those guys on camels with their gold and frankincense and myrrh. From my perspective, Christmas is about as archetypal a collective concept as human beings have ever created together, and being human, I am just as entitled to own it, and to participate in its delightful jumble of pagan, Christian, ancient, modern, sentimental, commercial and spiritual traditions as anybody else. December 25 does not belong to the Christians; they didn’t originate it, the Romans did; and the majority of traditions that we associate with the Christmas season are clearly rooted either in the nature cults of pre-Christian Europe, or are the products of the cultural imagination of the most recent two centuries in the English-speaking world. Advertisers, movie makers, and authors from Dickens to O. Henry, have given us the current popular image of Santa and his reindeer, as well as a plethora of utterly secular interpretations of the meaning of Christmas.

It would be easy to think – and many people do assume – that the cultural habit of exchanging Christmas presents with all and sundry is one of those latter inventions, an artifact of the increasing commercialism of a market economy. Certainly the blizzard of advertising that descends upon us each December here in the early 21^st century would suggest that manufacturers and merchants had imposed this holiday upon the rest of us for the overt purpose of selling us stuff. But this is one of those intuitive notions which closer examination does not support. In truth, the customs and structures of gift-giving are some of the most primal elements of social order; they even appear in rudimentary form among the higher primates. Exchanges of food, grooming, and child care help to cement the bonds of community in groups of apes, chimps, and a variety of other mammals. This ancient capacity for reciprocity is essential to creating and maintaining affiliation, which is what makes society possible. Without the offering and receiving of gifts, human culture cannot get started. In fact, a present is a very freighted thing, for it carries meaning and relationship, symbolizing in a powerful and tangible way the connections that make us who and what we are.

In the early part of the 20^th century, academic anthropologists became interested in the way that gift exchanges seemed to both express and create social structures among so-called primitive peoples. In his 1923 Essay sur le don; forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies, the French scholar Marcel Maus described the three obligations entailed in gift-giving: the obligation to give gifts (for by giving, one shows oneself to be generous, and thus as deserving of respect), the obligation to receive them (for by receiving the gift, one shows respect to the giver, and thus demonstrates one's own generosity), and the obligation to return the gift (thereby showing that one's honor is - at least - equivalent to that of the original giver). Gift-giving is thus steeped in morality, and by giving, receiving and reciprocating gifts, a moral bond is created between the persons exchanging gifts.

Maus observed that the objects and services exchanged in "primitive" gift-giving are laden with "power"; the gift is economic, political, kinship-oriented, legal, mythological, religious, magical, practical, personal and social. By moving such an object through the social landscape, the gift-giver rearranges the fabric of social connection - and it is this that forms the basis of the gift's power. At the same time, Maus emphasized that there are also competitive and strategic aspects of gift-giving: that by giving more than one's competitors, one lays claim to greater respect and status.

More recently, in his 1983 volume, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, American anthropologist Lewis Hyde examines the effect our current immersion in the free market economy has both on our view of gifts, and on our ability to give and receive them. A market economy, he suggests, is deliberately impersonal, but the whole purpose of a 'gift economy' is to establish and strengthen the relationships between people, to connect us one to the other. It is this element of relationship which leads Hyde to speak of gift exchange as 'erotic' commerce, opposing eros (the principle of attraction, union, involvement which binds together) to logos (reason and logic in general, the principle of differentiation in particular). In this sense, the market economy is an emanation of logos, in which one can hoard one's goods without losing wealth. Indeed, wealth is increased by hoarding – although we generally call it 'saving'. In contrast, in a gift economy, wealth is decreased by hoarding, for it is the circulation of gifts within the community that leads to increase – increase in connections, increase in relationship strength.

Now personally, I think that there is a great deal to be said for the rational, impersonal ‘logos’ of a market economy. It increases the overall ‘wealth’ of the community by making it more likely that those who want to sell some item, and those who want to buy that item, can come together and make the exchange – whether or not they have any on-going relationship. And that’s a good thing; it has given rise to the unprecedented levels of surplus resources over and above those necessary for survival that much of the human community enjoys today, and that all might ultimately have access to. But what it does not do is that older, less rational task of structuring and supporting our intimate connections with one another; it does not replace our profoundly human need for gifts, and the moral imperatives of generosity and gratitude that can only arise in the context of a culture of gift exchange. For we cannot have in-depth, personal relationships with every other human being on the planet; it simply isn’t possible given the limits of our cognitive abilities and our stamina. We can, of course, have a personal relationship with any other human being on the planet; we need not be limited by artificial barriers, but we are limited by overall capacity. And so we, like our earliest ancestors, must find ourselves within local communities of intimacy; families, neighborhoods, teams, professions, churches; all the circumstantial and voluntary associations that contain us and make us real in a network of relationships. It is these connections that are cultivated and sustained by gifts; by the peculiar logic of reciprocity and mutuality, which is not, in fact, the rational equation of the market. Rather, as Lewis Hyde writes, "The only essential is this; the gift must always move… In fact, it is better if the gift is not returned to the original giver, but rather is given instead to some new, third party." For this is how the bonds of community expand, and become more inclusive. In the economy of gift exchange, success lies not in accumulation, but in the capacity for giving. The figure of Santa Claus is beloved not for the cache of goodies that he might have piled up at the North Pole, but rather for what he bestows upon the children of the world; his capacity to give. I submit that we need such mythic images in our culture; we need Christmas, with its alternative economic logic, not to replace the structures of the free market, but to complement them; to renew the bonds of community and the spiritual virtues of both openhandedness and grateful acceptance, that perhaps make no market sense, but that make us human.

Author O. Henry put forward the claim that Jim and Della, his "two foolish children in a flat," are "…of all who give and receive gifts, the wisest; they are the magi." If one insists on looking at the matter practically, they are indeed foolish, for in their impulse to honor one another with gifts beyond their means, they have each sacrificed what made the other’s offering precious. And yet, if the story is about something else, something more profound, something about the quality of their care for one another and the bond they are constructing between them, through what appears surely to be their first Christmas together, then perhaps indeed they are wise beyond the logic of mere calculation. For it was not the advertisers of tortoise shell combs and the manufacturers of platinum watch chains who induced Jim and Della to behave irrationally; no, it was not the market at work in them at all. It was that older, deeper logic of relationship, which knows that it is by our gifts that we live, and love, and have our being in this world, and by that measure they were most truly magi, the wise ones. That ancient wisdom, which lies at the heart of the holiday season, owes nothing at all to Jesus – though perhaps he himself knew something about it when he came to the days of his own ministry. But this mid-winter solstice Saturnalia festival has its roots and its power not in any theological proposition or creed, not in the truth or falsity of any historical events, but rather in the eternal knowing of the human heart that gifts must always move; that to give is a blessing, and to receive is a grace; that it is when we spread our gifts out into the world that we are most truly rich. This is the wisdom that my childhood Avon Lady, in her own patient generosity, helped me to practice, and so to learn. And it does not seem to me, in the world as we know it today, that one month out of the year is too much time to devote to that lesson.

And so I am happy to say, as a humanist, that I adore the whole Christmas season; that every candle lit in the darkness of these days has its echo and its answer in my own utterly human heart; that I have need of gifts, to give my own and to receive them from others, in the irrational, even foolish calculus of love; that every homeless family and new born child touches me profoundly; that there is magic in music and starlight that I cannot explain; that I will not surrender to any momentary political stupidity or expediency my ultimate hope for peace on earth, good will to all people, and tidings of great joy. No exclusivist dogma has ever captured or possessed this truth of the human spirit, nor ever will. May we all be wise in the ways of the human spirit in this season; may we be numbered among those who give and receive gifts, as the wisest. May we be, each and all, the magi.