“What’s going on with Black Friday this year?”, my wife asked me in Sainsbury’s the other week. We were walking past an advertising hoarding for some brand’s Black Friday deal. But it wasn’t Black Friday. In fact, it was a week before Thanksgiving. It got me thinking. Black Friday must be the most ironic date in the calendar. After a day specifically set aside for expressing gratitude for everything you already have, you immediately plunge back into more vigorous consumption than ever before, as though to relieve the strain of having abstained for a whole 24 hours. It is, says Wikipedia, the busiest shopping day of the year in the United States.

But what started with Black Friday has not stayed with Black Friday. Many businesses now do deals for ‘Black Friday Week’ – not to mention ‘Cyber Monday’ (a day for buying things online). To be fair, you can do penance on ‘Giving Tuesday’, but I’m not sure how much that has penetrated the public imagination.

This isn’t meant as a dig at American culture. In Britain, it’s telling that we’re slowly adopting Black Friday Week (fortnight?) without even doing Thanksgiving beforehand. And I understand that a lot of Black Friday/Cyber Monday spending must be people taking advantage of the discounts to buy gifts for other people. Nor am I claiming to be any different. We’re all shaped by our culture. My New Year’s Resolution this year was that for every new book I buy, I would read or reread two that I already own. The results have been a revelation to me. I’ve bought about a third as many books as in 2023. But the biggest challenge has been to my thinking. So many of last year’s purchases were essentially impulse buys. I see, I want, I buy. I have reflected so much harder on what books I buy this year for no better reason than that a self-imposed rule ensures that I have to have a reasonable expectation that I might actually read them. It’s shown me how much my heart is shaped by the pleasure of clicking ‘buy now’ and of seeing a book (gathering dust) on my shelf. And, of course, books are hardly the only thing I am addicted to consuming.

What does all this have to do with Advent? Well, even if Black Friday is the USA’s biggest single day of shopping, it has nothing on the run up to Christmas. Remarking at how thoroughly commercialised the festival has become is now as much of a seasonal tradition as carol singing, turkey, and tinsel. Sixty-five years ago, satirical lyricist Tom Lehrer¹ riffed off a series of traditional carols to sing

“Hark the Herald Tribune sings

Advertising wondrous things!

God rest ye merry, merchants

May you make the Yuletide pay!

Angels we have heard on high

Tell us to go out and BUY!”

I’m not here to tell you how much to spend on Christmas. I’m all for generous gift giving (but if you can, I really encourage you to give generously to a charitable cause as well at this time of year). A certain amount of what would otherwise count as excessive consumption is not inappropriate as part of celebrating a festival. I have always loved Christmas decorations. I’ve no wish to be puritanical. But weeks on end (cue traditional lament that it gets earlier every year) of being relentlessly bombarded with adverts for food, drinks, and every consumer product the human mind has yet conceived of is a threat to more than just our waistlines and wallets. Jesus himself warns us to watch ourselves ‘lest your hearts be weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and cares of this life, and that day [the day of his return] come suddenly on you like a trap.’ (Luke 21:34) Paul ‘often’ warned the churches of those whose way of life reveals that they are ‘enemies of the cross of Christ’. ‘Their end is destruction, their god is their belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things.’ (Philippians 3:18-19)

You can largely avoid the temptations to fix your mind and heart on earthly things in the run up to Christmas by abstaining from all things Christmas entirely. A relatively small number of Reformed Christians take this perfectly honourable option. But if, like most in the evangelical world, you take Christmas but leave Advent (or reduce it to a Christmas countdown) I wonder if you are leaving yourself largely unprotected from the dangers of Christmas commercialisation.

I’ll happily admit that Advent isn’t the magic bullet for resisting the pull of our culture’s pervasive consumer ethic. But I genuinely think that it can help a great deal, if we take it seriously. Paul tells us what the right attitude to take is in contrast to worldliness. ‘But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.’ (Phil 3:20-21)

The remedy for Christmas commercialism is to set our minds on the day to come, when our Saviour returns for us. It’s to remember that our great hope is not in this world alone, in the acquisition of stuff and the pleasure of consumption. It’s to remember that the cares of life now will all seem irrelevant on the day Jesus returns. Advent, the season where we meditate above all on the return of Jesus, is the cure by opposites that Christmas commercialism calls for. Even as we do our Christmas shopping, it keeps before our consciences that we are surrounded by baubles in more sense than one at this time of year.

But it does better than merely warn our consciences. Its message is more than simply abstinence (as the ‘no to all things Christmas’ approach might amount to). Advent speaks to our hearts by reminding us of something better than the toys and treats of Western consumerism. If our hearts are stayed on the joy that we look forward to in the age to come, the compulsive need to enjoy things now will seem less urgent. And, ironically, that has the chance to free us from the chains of misdirected desires now – free from the relentless thirst for more, the gnawing pain of envy, the guilt that follows swift on overindulgence, free to feel thankful for what we have, to serve those around us cheerfully, and to know that better things by far are yet to come, because of the fabulous grace and generosity of our God and Saviour.

Not that I have found all this freedom yet myself. Advent is a season of repentance. It’s a season for taking stock of how far we have forgotten these things and a time to remedy that neglect. It’s a time to seek forgiveness and change our ways. It’s a time to renew hope and redirect desires. Advent is the season that I need right now and you might find something in it for what ails you too.

1. If you’ve never listened to Tom Lehrer before, it’s worth knowing before you start that he specialised in dark humour, irreverence and cynicism. He was actively trying to shock and offend in the 50s and 60s and it is a tribute to how well he succeeded that many of his songs (though not this particular one) still contravene the canons of good taste and decency today. ↩︎