This year Christmas – sorry, make that the holidays – began in early October.  That’s when I saw my first pre-Black Friday ad. Yes, it seemed a little premature.  But it’s never too early to buy stuff. And in a troubled economy, indulging our appetites by purchasing more of anything is a kind of real time, patriotic, very practical Pledge of Allegiance.  Speaking for myself, though, I like to “make straight the way” to the autumn festivities by rereading two of my favorite seasonal texts.

The first is Neil Postman’s classic religious essay, “The Parable of the Ring Around the Collar,” about a hapless housewife using the wrong detergent for her husband’s white shirts.  It’s collected here.  As Postman notes, “Television commercials are a form of religious literature.  To comment on them in a serious vein is to practice hermeneutics, the branch of theology concerned with interpreting and explaining the Scriptures.”

Most important TV commercials, he says – and let’s remember that holiday commerce has a salvific role for many businesses – “take the form of religious parables organized around a coherent theology.  Like all religious parables, they put forward a concept of sin, intimations of the way to redemption, and a vision of heaven.  They also suggest what are the roots of evil, and what are the obligations of the holy.”

Read more at The Catholic Thing