Christmas, Easter, and the Billion-Dollar Holidays
Christmas is the most commercially successful event in the American calendar. Easter is a close second. Both commemorates events at the absolute center of Christian theology. The gap between what they mean and what they have become is one of the most visible contradictions in American religious life — and the tradition has quite a lot to say about it.
The Answer
In 2023, Americans spent approximately $964 billion on Christmas. That is not a typo. Nearly one trillion dollars — on gifts, decorations, travel, food, and entertainment associated with a holiday commemorating the birth of a child to an unwed teenage refugee in a borrowed stable because there was no room in the inn.
Easter spending reached $24 billion. This is the holiday marking the resurrection of a man who was executed by the state for threatening the economic and religious establishment. He rose from the dead, according to the tradition — and the primary commercial response is chocolate eggs and stuffed rabbits.
To be clear about what is being observed: Christmas commemorates the Incarnation — the theological claim that God entered human history as a helpless infant in a feed trough, born to people with no money and no social standing, shortly before becoming refugees fleeing political violence. Easter commemorates the Resurrection — the claim that the same person, after being tortured and killed by the most powerful empire on earth, defeated death itself.
These are not occasions that naturally lend themselves to a three-month retail season.
It would be easy to write this as a simple "commercialism bad" complaint, and the tradition does have something to say about that. But the more interesting question is structural: how did the two holiest events in Christian theology become the two most commercially successful retail seasons in the American economy? And what does it mean for a tradition that begins with God choosing poverty, displacement, and obscurity as his entry point into the world?
The Jewish Reformer's Lens
Jesus was raised in a Jewish tradition that had its own version of this tension. The Temple in Jerusalem had become, by the 1st century, a significant economic institution. Money changers operated in the Temple courts — providing the official Temple currency required for offerings, at exchange rates that enriched the Temple establishment. Sellers of sacrificial animals operated nearby, allowing pilgrims to purchase what they needed rather than carry it from home.
This was not entirely without practical justification. Pilgrims traveled from across the ancient world to worship in Jerusalem. The system served a need. And then Jesus walked in and turned over the tables.
The scene in John 2:13-16 is striking not because Jesus objected to worship per se, but because he objected to the entanglement of commerce and sacred space. "Stop turning my Father's house into a market." The Greek word used — emporion — is the root of our word "emporium." A shopping mall. He is describing the Temple as a shopping mall and he is furious about it.
The Jewish concept of Shabbat — the Sabbath, the weekly day of rest commanded in the Torah — is the most radical economic statement in the Hebrew Bible. One day in seven, the economy stops. Not slows — stops. No buying, no selling, no producing. The tradition built a wall around that cessation and defended it fiercely for millennia, precisely because the pressure to keep the economy running never stops. Shabbat says: the economy is not God. There are things that matter more.
The commercialization of the two holiest days in the Christian calendar is the inverse of Shabbat: taking the days when the tradition most insists that something transcendent happened, and filling them with commerce.
Catholic Social Teaching
The Catholic Church has a long and complicated relationship with this question, and it is worth being honest about the complications. The Church built many of its grandest cathedrals with economic systems that exploited the poor. The medieval indulgence trade — selling remissions of punishment for sin — was, functionally, the commercialization of salvation itself. Martin Luther's protest against indulgences in 1517 was, among other things, a protest against turning religious observance into a revenue stream.
The tradition's critique of consumer culture, however, is clear and consistent. Pope Francis in Evangelii Gaudium (2013 — "The Joy of the Gospel," his programmatic document on the Church's mission) wrote: "This economy kills." He was speaking about an economic system that treats growth and consumption as ends in themselves, regardless of what they cost in human dignity. The "throwaway culture" he describes — in which people and things are used and discarded — is the logical endpoint of a holiday season organized around purchasing things that will mostly end up in landfills.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§2113) warns against "idolatry" — which it defines not only as worshipping false gods in the ancient sense, but as "divinizing what is not God." Wealth, power, the state, and pleasure can all become idols. A holiday season that has effectively replaced the theological content of Christmas and Easter with a consumption ritual is, by this definition, a form of practical idolatry — not because anyone consciously chose to worship shopping, but because the behavior patterns have the structure of worship: annual observance, ritual objects, communal participation, emotional significance.
Laudato Si' (2015) identifies "compulsive consumerism" as spiritually damaging — not merely economically wasteful, but corrosive to the inner life that faith requires.
Sources & Citations
- John 2:13–16 — Cleansing of the Temple (New Testament) One of the four Gospels. Jesus enters the Temple courts, finds money changers and animal sellers, makes a whip of cords, and drives them out. "Stop turning my Father's house into a market." The most explicit Gospel text on the relationship between commercial activity and sacred space.
- Luke 2:1–20 — The Birth of Jesus (New Testament) One of the four Gospels. The nativity narrative. The details are theologically dense: a census (imperial administrative apparatus), no room at the inn (displacement), a manger (poverty), shepherds as first witnesses (the lowest-status workers in the region, legally barred from testifying in Jewish courts). God's entry into history is explicitly associated with marginalization, not abundance.
- Exodus 20:8–11 — The Sabbath Commandment (Hebrew Bible) The Torah. The fourth of the Ten Commandments: remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. No work — not for you, your children, your servants, your animals, or the immigrants living with you. The tradition's most radical economic statement: the economy has a day off. Nothing and no one is purely an instrument of production.
- Matthew 6:19–21 — Treasures in Heaven (New Testament) One of the four Gospels, from the Sermon on the Mount. "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven." The contrast Jesus draws is not between saving and spending, but between what is lasting and what is not. The consumption economy is organized around exactly the kind of accumulation Jesus warns against.
- Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium (2013), §§53–54 Apostolic exhortation. "This economy kills." Francis diagnoses an economic system that has made the market the measure of all things, that excludes the poor structurally, and that treats growth as a good regardless of what it destroys. Christmas retail is a microcosm of that system: it generates enormous economic activity while systematically displacing the theological content it claims to celebrate.
What Should We Do?
For everyone: This is not primarily a call to boycott Christmas shopping. Most people are buying gifts for people they love, and love is not the problem. The question worth sitting with is: what are we actually celebrating, and does our celebration reflect it?
The nativity story is about God choosing poverty, displacement, and vulnerability as the conditions for the most important event in history. If the way we celebrate that story involves taking on debt to buy things people don't need, driving consumption in an economy that is literally warming the planet, and spending three months in a state of anxious acquisition — something has gotten confused.
A practical question: what would it mean to celebrate Christmas in a way that actually reflected its content? Giving to people in genuine need rather than exchanging gifts among the comfortable. Slowing down rather than speeding up. Making something rather than buying it. Spending time rather than money. These are not novel ideas — they are what most spiritual traditions across history have recommended for their holy days.
For Catholics specifically: The Church gives you Advent — four weeks of preparation before Christmas — and it is supposed to be a season of fasting, prayer, and expectation, not four weeks of shopping. The liturgical calendar exists precisely to push against the commercial calendar. Using it intentionally is an act of counter-cultural resistance, which is, historically, what Christian practice has often been.
Easter is harder. The secular holiday has been so thoroughly colonized by spring imagery (eggs, bunnies, pastels) that many children grow up with no awareness of what the holiday is actually about. The Holy Week practices — Palm Sunday, Holy Thursday, Good Friday, the Easter Vigil — exist to immerse you in the story before the celebration. They are among the most profound liturgical experiences in any Christian tradition. They are also almost entirely invisible in the commercial culture.