Happy Black Friday—the biggest shopping day of the year, and the official start of the apocalyptic time known as the "Christmas shopping season!"

I thought I'd take a moment on this sacred day to offer one confession, and one wish.

First the confession: My family and friends think I'm cheap. And they're right. I'm cheap.

I don't buy a lot of gifts for people, for the holidays or birthdays. I've been known to make things, draw pictures, give "interactive gifts" like a dinner out... with me. 

I don't know where the impulse comes from... whether it's really thrift at heart, or whether I've got some deep inner sense of what a "gift" is that has to do with the human exchange of something precious, something valuable.

Probably the best vision of this kind of giving I can think of is O. Henry's famous story, "Gift of the Magi." I won't give away the ending, but it certainly changes forever the way you think about giving.

So for some time, I've felt sick around Christmas. I don't know if living in New York, with all of the commercialism in our faces at street level, is better or worse than living in the 'burbs where you have to drive by car to a great sprawling exurban mall to stock up on gifts. My sense is that both can suck the life out of you.

I know that some people find joy in holiday shopping. My dad used to love buying toys and gadgets for my brother and me. Others love the thrill of the hunt for the perfect gift. But I think the surface excitement of Christmas shopping masks the disease that consumption has become in our culture. Buying things has become an emotional outlet—a sad and ephemeral way of expressing meaning. But if O. Henry was on to one thing, he was on to the idea that gift-giving is about giving one thing that embodies our connection to the recipient of our gift. Too often, in our culture of abundance, we give one another irrelevant, useless stuff... stuff that clogs closets and eventually landfills, and drains our wallets of money that could—and dare I say should—be used to give vital, life-giving gifts to our loved ones and to strangers.

This is why I'm excited about the movement called Advent Conspiracy. Its tag line is "restoring the scandal of Christmas by replacing consumption with compassion." It has the chance for me to bring our congregation together into a new way of thinking and acting this Christmas.

I have to admit, I think that some folks at Marble will hate it. They're not going to get what Advent Conspiracy is all about... and they're going to feel judged. Which is how any of us feels when people first point out to us that we're doing something we probably shouldn't be doing.

But I'm going to encourage that we sign on, even if in a small and partial way. The consumptive Christmas is dead. Something else is waiting to be born... whether we're there to greet it or not is in our hands...