RELIGION : Creative Gift-Giving Market Aims to Curb ‘Santa Claus’ Theology : Groups Offer Alternatives to Christmas Commercialism

“Just whose birthday is it, anyway?” United Methodist minister Milo Thornberry wondered back in the early 1970s as he stood hip-deep in gift wrappings. Commercialism and “Santa Claus theology” had gotten way out of hand, he decided, and there must be a better way to celebrate Christmas.

So, 15 years ago, Thornberry founded Alternatives. The nonprofit organization is designed to help church members recover a Christ-centered Christmas and “restore perspective to a season that often degenerates into a religion-sanctioned orgy of self-indulgence.”

Alternatives, housed in a converted two-story general store in a rural suburb of Atlanta is now a national movement.

And this Christmas, the organization, officially sanctioned by half a dozen denominations, has provided resources to 200,000 individuals and churches, offering simple and creative alternatives in gift-giving.

Alternatives’ 32-page comic-book-style leaflet, “Whose Birthday is it, Anyway?” is packed with stories, ideas and activities for children and adults--such as alloting 25% of the family holiday budget to helping the needy, and giving gifts of time and skills rather than costly presents.

A similar but unrelated program, especially popular among Southern California churches, is called Alternative Christmas Market. Founded in 1980 by Harriet C. Prichard at Pasadena Presbyterian Church, the group provides a “shopping list” of supplies and services for the needy at home and overseas that can be purchased on behalf of family members or friends.

Purchases from “marts” held in the patios of 65 churches in eight states during this November and December are expected to top $350,000, said Prichard, who now operates the program from Lucerne Valley, near Victorville.

Some of the charitable organizations participating in the Alternative Christmas Market program are Heifer Project International, which distributes farm animals and bees to the impoverished of the world; Habitat for Humanity International, whose shopping list includes building materials for low-cost housing, and the Mennonite Central Committee, which sends blankets to countries such as Vietnam, Nicaragua and the Sudan.

Program Expanding

Arcadia Presbyterian Church, which has increased its “mart” sales each of the three years it has participated in the Alternative Christmas Market, raised about $10,000 this Christmas. And tiny (70-member) Malibu United Methodist Church upped its mart revenues by expanding its shopping list to include Third World Hand Arts of Santa Ana, relief for earthquake victims in Armenia and rent money for a homeless pregnant teen-ager.

“We talk about it as the ‘alternative,’ ” said Ann Broyles, who, with her husband, Larry Peacock, are co-pastors of the Malibu church. “It’s one of the best ways to give at Christmas to those who have need rather than to those who have all they need.”

Emily Click of Claremont United Church of Christ is sold on the value of Alternatives materials; in fact, she gives talks to Southern California clergy groups to promote alternative giving, and her church chooses three or four charities to support each Christmastime.

“It’s a wonderful thing for Americans to give their Christmas dollars to things that count,” she said. “Alternative giving is an idea whose time has come--that’s for sure.”

‘No Magic Formula’

But Alternatives founder Thornberry cautioned that “there is no magic formula. We’re a minority movement. . . . The tension between faith and a consumer culture is a much larger theme than just Christmas. We’re not going to change this culture anytime soon.

“What we’re talking about is how to survive with some sense of integrity for your faith,” Thornberry said in a telephone interview this week from his office in Ellenwood, Ga.

St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, a small multiracial congregation on the edge of the USC campus in Los Angeles, used Alternatives materials for the first time this year, adapting home-study lessons for the four weeks of Advent.

Each Sunday, Pastor Brian Eklund had worshipers write out what they needed to do to get spiritually ready for Christmas. These lists were then made into symbols--paper cutouts of moons, suns, stars, doves and angels--and hung on a Christmas tree at the front of the church. And the young people enacted a minidrama during the lighting of the Advent candles, centering on simplicity and helping others.

“Ours is a poor congregation,” Eklund said. “ ‘The season to be jolly’ can be a sad time for people who don’t have money; the pressure is on to buy--the children see it. We’re trying to take the pressure off and allow people to focus on the birth of the child (Jesus).”

Alternatives’ Thornberry also wants to take the focus off Santa and place it on St. Nicholas, the patron saint who loved and cared for children and whose day of celebration is generally observed Dec. 6.

“Santa was an admirable, heroic figure,” Thornberry explained, “but his image is so tarnished and thoroughly exploited to sell everything and anything that I doubt he is redeemable. . . . He has become the symbol for an alternative religion.”

It’s all summed up in the ditty, “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” Thornberry, 50, added in the interview. “First, it says, that like God, Santa is omniscient and knows everything about you, whether you’ve been naughty or nice. Second, it teaches that there’s a judgment day--Dec. 25--and the good get rewards while the bad get coal, switches or nothing.

“That teaches poor kids and rich kids notions equally reprehensible: that if you’re poor you’re bad, and if you’re rich you’re good.”

Some other Alternatives suggestions for families during the Christmas season:

- Spend less time in malls and watching television and more in reflection, study and family activities that are “non-consumptive and non-commerce oriented.”

- Make a “cost analysis” of Christmas gifts, entertainment and the like, and covenant as a family to give a certain percentage of holiday spending to the needy or a charity.

- Invite senior citizens, exchange students, the homeless and others who would otherwise be alone at Christmas to share Christmas to make the celebration “inclusive rather than exclusive.”

- Challenge the assumption that giving gifts means buying “things” and that expensive gifts bring happiness.

Continuing an annual tradition, Alternatives on Wednesday announced the winners of its “best” and “worst” Christmas-gift contest.

Co-winners for best gifts last Christmas were a daily desktop greeting calendar, filled with messages, jokes and photos from friends and relatives, sent from a Houston woman to her daughter in Iowa; and the gift of a day’s yard clean-up and roof repair performed for a Virginia woman by her son and his family in exchange for a plate of cookies and candy.

The worst Christmas gift of last year, as judged by Alternatives, was a brush and comb set given by insensitive relatives to a New Jersey man who had become bald because of chemotherapy treatments. Runner-up was a large “lick-and-look” candy sucker presented to an Ontario, Canada, woman by a not-so-close friend. The sucker, in the shape of a man, “stripped as she licked,” Thornberry related.

Alternatives’ 1988 campaign sponsors are the Christian Reformed Church, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the Reformed Church in America, the United Church of Christ and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit. With a staff of five, Alternatives has an annual budget of $280,000.