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The days running up to Christmas are usually filled with shopping — frantically searching department stores, or Amazon, to find the right gift for the right person.
When the big day dawns, the stockings are full, kids race downstairs to see what’s under the tree and wrapping paper is left strewn across the house. It can all feel like a frenzy of consumerism, and religious people sometimes denounce the emphasis on buying stuff. Yet perhaps a better way of putting it is that Christmas is a time when we learn to do something that lies at the heart of the universe: to give.
Christmas has been described as a “feast of giving” — not just to our family and friends, but through charitable giving to those who need our help. For some families, giving gifts at Christmas can stretch the finances to breaking point. Yet it is worth doing, because the giving of gifts is good — and good for us.
According to the Charities Aid Foundation, giving in the UK has declined over the past decade and we recently dropped out of the top 20 nations when it comes to giving money, time or helping strangers. Giving from the wealthiest appears to be in decline. The 100 top givers in the UK gave a collective £3.2bn to charity last year — down £200mn on last year’s total giving. Less than 30 per cent of us give regularly out of our income and the young are less likely to give than the old.
According to the Christian vision of reality, everything we have was originally a gift. Every breath we breathe, every penny we own, every item of clothing, every item in our homes is a good gift from a God who created it, or the material out of which it is made.
As a result, the characteristic Christian way of thinking of our personal possessions or wealth is on the one hand to look after what we have been given as something worth caring for, yet at the same time being generous in giving away what was, after all, only given to us in the first place. It avoids two extremes: careless profligacy and avaricious hoarding.
In fact, there is something about this conviction that encourages the habit of giving. As the fourth century bishop, St Augustine of Hippo, put it: “If we believe that God has given us everything, then giving will be our way of living.” When we give, we do something cosmically and ethically very significant — we are in step in with the very heartbeat of the universe.
Giving gifts sustains our communal life together. It keeps things in circulation, as they were meant to be. Taxation does that in a more systematic way, but gift giving is voluntary, engages our hearts, and creates a relationship between the giver and the recipient.
One of the early church fathers, St Basil of Caesarea, preached fiery sermons to his congregations, pinpointing the hoarding of wealth as one of the greatest sins. For him, wealth hoarded turns bad on us, like food stored beyond its use-by date, getting riddled with maggots, or starting to decay. Holding on to too much wealth is harmful. In a memorable image, imagining the miser who hides his wealth in a hole in the ground (or a large Swiss bank account) “as you are burying your wealth, you entomb with it your own heart”.
“Wealth left idle is of no use to anyone,” he writes, “but put to use and exchanged, it becomes fruitful and beneficial for everyone.” Wealth is meant to be circulated, used — not just to gain more wealth, but to benefit others — either by investment in companies that do the most good for our neighbours, or by giving. He imagines the generous wealthy giver as a large river that spreads out into tributaries and irrigates the fields, bringing life and health to many.
In other words, giving is good for society. It is good for the needy. It is good for the wealthy. It is good for all of us. However much we own, much or little, giving away some of it is good for us.
At the heart of the Christian idea of Christmas is the greatest gift of all — where God gave himself to mankind as a crying baby in an obscure town on the edge of the Roman empire. As a result, the Christian celebration of Christmas has always involved the giving of gifts. Yet giving is not just for Christmas. When you search the internet for the right gift, when you make a seasonal donation to a charity, you are echoing the very heart of reality, creating a habit that doesn’t stop with this season, but can make generous giving into a way of life.
Graham Tomlin is a former Bishop of Kensington, director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and editor-in-chief of seenandunseen.com
