From Bethlehem to Black Friday: How We Lost Christmas (and How to Find It Again)

Every December, I make a vow that this will be the year I do Christmas better.  Not “better” as in color-coordinated gift wrap or a Martha Stewart-level centerpiece which involves cranberries, sugar pinecones, and glue-gun acrobatics. I mean “better” as in I will slow down. I will sit by the Advent candles. I will reflect on a baby in a manger rather than obsess over whether my Amazon delivery is lost in a distribution center somewhere near East St. Louis.

But inevitably, somewhere around mid-December, I find myself humming All I Want for Christmas Is You against my will, eating my weight in peppermint bark, and wondering if the Hallmark Channel has developed a plot-generating algorithm that automatically pairs a career-driven woman named Holly with a flannel-wearing woodworker named Jack.

Christmas, it seems, has drifted from “O Holy Night” to “O Holy Cow, where did all these receipts come from?” And it didn’t happen suddenly; it happened slowly, subtly, as most great cultural drift does. A gentle slide from Bethlehem to Black Friday, nudged along by sleigh bells, sugar cookies, and our collective inability to resist a good seasonal sale.

Let’s take a warm, slightly nostalgic, slightly sarcastic stroll through how Christmas evolved from sacred celebration to commercial extravaganza and how we might reclaim it.

Once upon a simpler time, Christmas music consisted entirely of hymns that mentioned Christ without any cameo appearances from reindeer. People sang O Come, All Ye Faithful without irony, and angels heralded good news.

It was peaceful, sacred, and refreshingly devoid of orchestras trying to “reimagine” anything with bongos. Then came Jingle Bells (1857), a catchy little tune with exactly zero spiritual content. Suddenly, Christmas music was allowed to be fun, festive, and—dare we say—commercially viable. By the time Bing Crosby gifted the world White Christmas, the commercialization train was fully on the tracks, picking up speed and stopping for eggnog along the way.

We didn’t mind. Bing had a way of making even gentle secularization feel warm and cozy, like being wrapped in a blanket of melodic nostalgia.

In the 80s, Amy Grant arrived like a soft-focus Christmas miracle. A Christmas Album (1983) mixed hymns with the instantly beloved Tennessee Christmas and made us believe we might get a revival in the music aisle. But by Home for Christmas (1992), the sound had shifted into lush pop production. Breath of Heaven was gorgeous—transcendent even—but clearly belonged in the “sacred adjacent” category. Amy didn’t create commercial Christmas music; she just read the room, smiled graciously, and harmonized her way into our hearts.

We were the ones who bought the CDs, the remastered CDs, and the Target-exclusive bonus tracks. Amy cashed the royalties.

There was once a time when Christmas movies taught us something: It’s a Wonderful Life showed us the value of sacrifice and community. A Charlie Brown Christmas quoted actual Scripture on network television. And then the 80s showed up.

Christmas Vacation introduced us to squirrels, electrocution, and the endurance limits of incandescent bulbs. Home Alone made child endangerment slapstick. The Santa Clause taught us that becoming Santa is basically a corporate onboarding experience.

Then Hallmark arrived and industrialized the genre: snow, small towns, bakery owners, career women reconsidering life choices, Christmas tree farms that apparently never struggle financially. It’s all charming and vaguely comforting in the same way powdered hot chocolate is warm, predictable, and suspiciously consistent.

Is there still Hope for Christmas? Absolutely. But it won’t come from Hollywood’s writing rooms, Spotify’s algorithms, or the seasonal aisle at Target. It starts with small, stubborn, sacred choices: Light the Advent candles before you light up your credit card. Read the nativity story before you read your shipping updates. Sing a hymn before surrendering to Mariah’s seasonal omnipresence. Watch Charlie Brown remind you that Linus still drops truth bombs from Luke 2. And, above all, give presence, not just presents.

Christmas has always been about God slipping quietly into the world, unnoticed by most, welcomed by few, but changing everything. The miracle remains intact. We need to turn down the noise long enough to hear it again.

Here’s a cozy, Christ-Centered Christmas playlist to refocus us:

Hymns

• O Come, O Come Emmanuel
• Silent Night
• Hark! The Herald Angels Sing
• O Holy Night
• Joy to the World

Films

• The Nativity Story (2006)
• It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
• A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965)
• The Star (2017)
• The Chosen: The Messengers (2021)

In the end, maybe Christmas isn’t something we lose so much as something we forget to notice. It waits for us in the margins (like those on my Baptist preacher father’s dog-eared Bible pages), between the errands, after the noise, beneath the glitter we keep insisting on adding. It’s there in the candlelight flickering on tired faces, in a child’s off-key carol, in the hush that settles over the world on Christmas Eve when, for a moment, we all seem to remember what matters. And if we pause long enough, we might find that Christmas hasn’t slipped away at all. It’s still right here, calling us back to the creche, to a promise, to a love big enough to become small for our sake. And that, more than anything we can wrap, buy, or bake, is the gift worth rediscovering every year.