Many retailers have enjoyed one of their busiest Christmas seasons, with some Dublin city traders claiming business is up by as much as 8 per cent. It is no wonder the American writer and preacher John Haynes Holmes once described the Christmas season as "the period when the public plays Santa Claus to the merchants."
But it is too easy to become cynical about the commercialisation and secularisation of Christmas. As reports in this newspaper in the past week have shown, Christmas still offers an attractive message to many who appear to have abandoned all religious practices for the rest of the year. They have been left with a sense of something missing, a yearning for the sacred, a mourning for childhood innocence, or a longing for a community connection. They want the candlelights and the carols, even if they cannot have the child in the crib.
The relevance of the child in the crib was brought home in the Christmas messages from all the Irish church leaders. Their messages remind us that the Christmas story is neither comfortable nor cosy. It is the story of a child born in poverty to parents forced to become refugees who find they are unwelcome strangers when they return home. It challenges us to remember the needs of strangers for, as Archbishop John Neill points out, that first Christmas family was like many of the people coming to Ireland today who "have been traumatised, whether by violence, political oppression or poverty," yet find no welcome and no understanding.
It was once a truism that Christmas was all about children. But this is hardly so for the children highlighted in this week's Prime Time report on poverty in Ireland, or for any child born in Ireland to non-national parents. It is certainly not so for many children throughout the world. The latest report from Unicef shows one in six children is severely hungry, one in seven has no healthcare, one in five has no safe water, and one in three has no toilet or sanitation facilities at home. Archbishop Robin Eames points out that this Christmas thousands of children are dying of HIV/AIDS, and suffering hunger and neglect. "The faces of tormented infants in refugee camps of the global south and the begging arms of mothers on our TV screens cry out for help," he says. "Perhaps those images present the greatest contrast imaginable to the secular obsession of the west, as we flock to buy and spend fortunes on ourselves."
But hope is also at the heart of the Christmas message, and we can do something for the Christmas Child that does something for all the Christmas children. We can help and encourage the development and mission agencies, so long the conscience of Ireland on development issues; we can remind the Government of its commitment to give 0.7 per cent of GDP to the developing world; and we can remind all governments that although the estimated annual cost of meeting the eight Millennium Development Goals by 2015 is $40-$70 billion, world military spending is running at $956 billion a year.