This article appeared in the Tallahassee Democrat on December 10, 1995. It was reprinted in the Baltimore Sun, Yakima Herald, Jacksonville Times-Union, Lakeland Ledger, and other papers.

Every year we hear people complain about the Christmas season appearing too early. Apparently they don't realize that we need this extra time to get in touch with ourselves spiritually and culturally, in a way that was not necessary in earlier decades. With the decline of the importance of religion and family in contemporary America, we need an increasingly long holiday season to form our cultural bonds at the end of the year--bonds that have been ignored during the preceding months.

It would be convenient to blame the earlier appearance of Christmas on the needs of commercial capitalism, but that's not the whole story. Those who squirm and complain about stores assaulting us sooner with the trappings of the season forget that Christmas wouldn't sell so well--now from Halloween until New Years Day--unless we needed it for other reasons.

With the decline of religion, family, and community in American life, we're left with an increasing need to find a spot where we can construct the moral and cultural mythology those institutions once provided. Consequently we are transforming the Christmas season to be part of our secular, civil religion. Santa has been converted from an ancient saint to the kind of figure our culture needs at the moment, a figure to replace what we feel lacking in other respects. So now when we look at Santa we're actually looking in the mirror: we see our own cultural preoccupations.

Santa, not confined by a set of scriptures, is a much more flexible fellow for our mythological needs. He can become a Franklin Roosevelt who wants social justice, a cracker-barrel philosopher at the country store able to give important advice, a psychological counselor willing to help with depression and anxiety, a soup-kitchen worker worried about the homeless, or a grandfatherly protector who provides continuity and comfort.

The holiday season has so much cultural gravity for us that even those Christmas songs without a religious element (bearing such sentiments as "I'll be Home for Christmas," "Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire," and "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas") are now nearly a sacred canon. These songs became revered almost instantly, so that even those only a few years old are treated as classics and performed by the best jazz musicians as part of the seasonal repertoire. No wonder composers jump to write Christmas songs, since those works have a good chance of becoming instant classics.

This remythologizing of Christmas began long ago, but it has increased dramatically in recent decades. The Charles Dickens "Christmas Carol," now 152 years old, gave us a secular story about the possibilities of transformation, regeneration, and redemption. In the story of Scrooge we find the promise of a second chance, an ability to pay reparations of love and charity to redeem ourselves from the selfishness of our modern commercial lives.

From Dickens's lead, we have constructed our own evolving Christmas mythology that addresses our current problems. Consider our holiday films and television shows. The Bill Murray "Scrooged" (like his film "Groundhog Day") is about regeneration and redemption, but transferred from Dickens's Victorian England to our corporate 20th century. Murray, as a media executive, is a particularly fitting Scrooge for the America of our time. But who can predict what kind of figure will best portray Scrooge for the world fifty years hence, when the Dickens' drama will need to be remade to reflect that period?

Charlie Brown, in the thirty year old Peanuts special, is in search of values that aren't materialistic and commercial during the winter holidays. Little Charlie Brown pleads for a world of wooden Christmas trees, no matter how scrawny, rather than tin and tinsel. The Grinch provides a similar lesson about the need to establish spiritual and cultural connections today. That cold-hearted creature becomes transformed only when he realizes that Christmas in the Whovilles of the world is not about material gifts but about community, love, and sharing.

In the Rudolph story, the red-nosed reindeer is a victim of society's brutishness and conformity. Could we find a clearer story about the need to accept diversity in our midst and realize the special contributions of those not like us? The tale of Rudolph is a holiday parable about repairing our multicultural bonds, about judging people by their hearts and their talents instead of their outward appearances.

And how does Santa himself fare in this remythologizing? Films such as "Miracle on 34th Street" and "Ernest Saves Christmas" show society believing that Santa is crazy, or a drunk. Just as some Christian stories have Jesus returning and not being recognized by people, so these films have Santa unrecognized by holiday crowds. But in the course of the story it is revealed that it's society, not Santa, who's crazy and operating by improper values, and it's society's responsibility to get "crazy" like Santa. Further, Santa has become a concerned democrat who feels a responsibility to the poor. As Jesus told his followers that "Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me," so Santa takes a personal affront at injustices done to anyone, but especially the weak and unfortunate.

Our holiday fables are increasingly the stage where we work out what plagues our cultural spirit. Is the institution of the family wobbling and in danger of collapse? Then through the lenses of our Christmas glasses we work out a meaning for the family that can support us in this troubled time. Recent holiday films such as "The Santa Clause" and the remake of "Miracle on 34th Street" try to repair the heartache of one-parent situations, with children asking Santa for the happiness of real families.

Finally, our holiday parables instruct us that if Christmas is to be found, it exists within our hearts and attitudes. As in the New York Sun editorial assuring eight year old Virginia that there is a Santa Claus, where we find Christmas is in ourselves. We remind ourselves, at least during the holidays, that we need some spiritual meaning within us if we are to survive as individuals and as a culture--even if that spirituality is constructed of secular values.

Formerly our cultural and spiritual needs were fulfilled weekly or more often in church. Now, in addition to being more secular, society is more specialized, and we segregate our time. We push all of our spiritual mythologizing into the late fall: to November and December. Because we no longer have a constant spiritual outlet such as the church once provided, now we need an increasingly long period to do perform that job once we finally get around to it. When religion was a daily presence in our lives, the cultural bonding and spiritual reaffirming of family bonds could be done in one week at Christmas. But without a strong and frequent religious participation we now need longer to accomplish that task.

Decades ago it took several weeks, then more recently a month, now that project consumes all of November and December. The Christmas holidays now begin around Halloween. But blaming this on the need for malls to find more customers is simply a convenient way to ignore what's going on in our own lives and what's changing in our culture.