Christmas comes at a cost. And it’s generally not the kind of cost that the penitential season of Advent invites—to clear away the clutter of life and prepare your heart for the Christ Child. Instead, and to the detriment of this beautiful feast, it involves accumulation and expenditure and a focus on the material rather than the spiritual.
There is a free verse poem by Robert Frost that recognizes the commercial takeover of Christmas. “Christmas Trees” was written in 1916, and it can quiet down the Christmas chaos for the recollecting Catholic. It’s not a religious poem, but it reminds us of the quietude that Advent should inspire and lays down the poetic principle that Christmas should be more about appreciation than appropriation. And there’s no one like Robert Frost, with his gruff but grand tone, to bring that point home.
Frost makes clear the tension between rural and urban life as a car drives up to a farm, bearing a salesman with an offer to buy the farmer’s trees as Christmas trees. As the farmer amusedly entertains the pitch, he wonders in his rustic way if, perhaps, the best Christmas trees might be the ones that stay out living on snowy hillsides and not the ones sold “off their feet to go in cars.” After examining his cluster of fir balsams, the salesman offers the measly price of $30 for a thousand trees—coming out to three cents a tree.
Like so much of Frost’s poetry, “Christmas Trees” is frank and forthright in working out a bit of wisdom—most welcome, given the cultural clamor that Advent struggles to exist in. It invites us to reconsider what we truly value, and to go ahead and value it even if it doesn’t hold up to the pressures of the world’s evaluations. Advent beckons us to take stock of the way things are, rather than flying into the frenzy of how the world thinks they should be. Both come at great cost—but some costs are more worthwhile than others.
Christmas is about cost. It recalls when heaven came to earth to pay the price for sin. It shouldn’t recall when earth comes to heaven and asks the going rate for a tree, or familial duty, or social obligation. Celebration and relational recognition are all beautiful and essential to the human experience, but they are accidents and aftershocks of the central duty to pay our respects at the manger.
In Advent, Catholics should take in account how God made the world, instead of what we have made of the world. We need incarnational things as much as we need the Incarnation, so let there be Christmas trees and presents by all means—but the concentration on the accoutrements of Christmas have obscured a silent assessment. Advent is for divesting, not investing, and it comes at the best kind of cost—the gift of ourselves. There is a pricelessness in the price of penance, and Robert Frost’s vision of a sacred and serene world is one that Christmas proliferation can never outweigh.
The shadow of Black Friday falls deep and long, indeed. Christmas has to work hard to lift itself above the fray to save itself as a time for peace on earth instead for pressure and worth. It’s dark to say, but jingling bells are more like the jangling chains, loading every person down with the burden of Jacob Marley as they fly on the wings of the wind through strip malls, boutiques, and Amazon tabs.
Robert Frost knew firsthand the despair born of this darkness, even though he was from a purer era of Americana. At a hard time of life, when he struggled to make ends meet, he had no prospect for buying presents for his children. So he loaded some belongings into a sleigh and took them to market to sell, where he met with no success. As he made his slow way home, he stopped by woods and, as he put it, “sat there and bawled like a baby.” Harness bells on his horse brought him back to the snowy evening and a resolve to keep promises and go the distance before he could sleep.
The famous poem born of this moment was born of Christmas heartache. The drive to deliver according to the dictates of the marketplace is not one the human race runs very happily. We are cursed with “stuff” instead of released by the glory of the growing dawn that saw the Word made Flesh, and that he dwelt among us, and is coming again.
Christmas has none of the good grit that it should, and that Frost valued as a Vermont farmer—the grit of God in a stall, of angels in a field, of kings among peasants. But in this good and glad grit, this happy hardship, comes a type of liberation from the established traces, from the slavery to sin and sales and social servitude—the liberty to be who we truly are. The current-day commercial cost of Christmas attaches too much value to priceable goods and not enough value on priceless goods. The cost of Christmas is our hearts, as Christina Rossetti famously penned in her beautiful carol “In the Bleak Midwinter.”
To be clear, Robert Frost didn’t object to Christmas trees. But he was critical of the cost that conflicted with the truest sentiment of the season. The financial has tainted the cultural, and that reality must be kept at bay. The Christmas tree is certainly one of the costs of Christmas. But there are costs that go beyond mere dollars and cents. Wth a little grace and calm, Catholics can circumvent “the trial by market everything must come to,” and which comes with a vengeance at Christmas.
The farmer spares his trees from that holiday industrial complex. He would give his trees away at a cost rather than collecting a cost for them. So it should be with us, to cover the cost of Christmas by focusing on the Christ Child and not our checkbook. The true Christmas cost is about release, revelation, and a stripping away the scales and systems that bind us all, ultimately foretelling a freedom from sin and death. We are all in this together, and the cost of Christmas is an attitude that proclaims the reality of our journey, our fellow journeyers, and our journey’s end, allowing men and women to recognize one another in the context of heavenly oblation, not earthly obligation.