Those of you unfortunate enough to be on my Facebook circle of influence have heard me rant about this subject before. However, I think this merits further discussion, simply because this particular song just bothers me on a number of levels. The song in question is, of course, The Christmas Shoes. For those of you who’ve never heard this song, welcome back to civilization and I hope you enjoyed your time at that Siberia concentration camp. Also, here is a link to the lyrics. Go on, we’ll wait.
The song was released in 2000 by the Christian group Newsong, and it has since been played to death on radio stations around Christmas season. It tells the story of a fellow who is engaged in that time honored Christmas tradition of shopping until your credit cards weep in agony. Come Christmas Eve, our brave hero is standing in line at a nameless department store when he notices a small child in front of him. The boy is filthy and quite clearly not part of the 1 percent as it becomes clear he is trying to buy a pair of women’s shoes. With a stack of pennies. For his dying mother. On Christmas Eve.
This is the kind of situation that would have made even Satan turn to the nearest demon and ask for a Kleenex. When it becomes obvious that even every penny in this boy’s anemic piggy bank will not cover the price of the shoes, this man, in an act of indescribable compassion and generosity, reaches into his wallet and pays for what amounts to roughly half of what he spent at Starbucks this morning.
Let’s do an instant replay of that.
This high/middle class man, who obviously has enough money to go on a Christmas shopping spree, encounters a small, dirty, poor boy in a store. The boy attempts to pay for a pair of shoes, for his dying mother, with every last penny in his woefully deficient piggy bank and comes up short. He turns around, looks up at the man behind him and tells him that his mother always made Christmas special for him at the cost of depriving herself of many things and now she is dying and all he wants is to buy her these pretty shoes before she meets Jesus.
Now.
For this particular man, is there a single response, other than paying for the damned shoes, which would not result on him being deemed by every person in the vicinity as the most heartless, selfish, degenerate asshole in the history of civilization? Is there, in fact, anything he can possibly do at that moment that will not label him as a soulless monster, other than paying for those shoes? I ask because the song makes it sound like he actually considered his options. I mean, I suppose when that child looked up at him and told him, with teary eyes, of his hopeless plight, the man could have replied, “Your mom is dying huh? That’s tragic, kid. Now, can you get the fuck out of the way? I have a Playstation and two iPads to pay for.” And he probably would have been immediately lynched by an angry mob of Christmas shoppers.
I guess what I’m saying is, this fellow is bragging about the fact that, when faced with an impossibly sad and heartbreaking situation, he behaved like a decent human being, which only makes me think that this is not his typical pattern of behavior. He might as well be bragging about the fact that once, when he found an abandoned baby on the sidewalk, he rushed it to the nearest hospital when he could just as easily have stomped it to death.
But you know what? That’s not even my biggest issue with this song.
As it all ends and the little boy runs home to his dying mother with the last pair of shoes she’ll ever wear, the song’s author decides that his audience is far too stupid to understand what just happened and proceeds to force-feed us the moral lesson of the story. In the last stanza, he claims that God had sent that little boy to remind him what Christmas was all about.
Right.
So God is out for a nice, quiet Christmas Eve around the world, maybe doing a little shopping of his own, when he happens upon a woman who is dying of some terrible disease. This woman has a family. She has children. She has been a good mother, denying herself many things to provide a little bit of happiness for her family. It is possible she had to work hard all her life and her death will leave these children without their mother’s love, and the family without an additional source of income they desperately need.
Now, God, being God, has literally, an infinite number of options on how to respond to this situation. He could ignore her. He could kill her. He could turn her into a newt. But more importantly, he could bloody heal her! Surely a Christmas Eve miracle is in order. It would save a life, bring happiness to an entire family and possibly strengthen the faith of everyone who hears about it.
Instead, the author of this song would have me know, when faced with the many, many options he has, including the option of performing a true Christmas miracle, God chooses instead to send this woman’s soon to be orphaned child on a shopping errand. Yes indeed, rather than saving a life and bringing happiness to a family and renewed faith to thousands, God chooses to send this poor, filthy boy away from his dying mother on Christmas Eve, in order to teach some middle class douche bag in a department store about the true meaning of Christmas.
And apparently, the true meaning of Christmas, according to The Christmas Shoes, is that the pain and misery of the lower class, is nothing more than God’s moral lesson for everyone else.
Class dismissed.
Originally Published 01/14/2012