The day after Christmas, the merchants all across America will gather around their cash registers and sing “What A Friend We Have In Jesus.”

They have Jesus to thank for the tremendous profits they will have made due to all the buying and spending that occurs during Christmas. “Tis the season” when we hear the refrain of so many “shopping days till Christmas.”

The build up to Christmas has a price tag on it, and it usually ends up leaving most Americans in debt.

Has Christmas been swallowed up, like every other holiday, by the dragon of consumption? Think of it, we are not referred to as “humans” in this economic system but rather as “consumers.”

The American economy could be comparable to a dragon with a life of its own. If we don’t feed it, it will die.

We feed it by consuming. The question is not what we consume, but what consumes us.

The behavior of “consumers” on Black Friday tells it all.

This is nothing new. In fact, it has become the norm for the holiday season. Not only Christmas but every holiday has been swallowed by the dragon of consumption.

A holy day is a time set aside for the sake of rest and reflection. Holidays are sacred days “cut out” from the everyday, mundane, routine calendar. They are intended, as Joseph Campbell would say, to “cast us out of our domesticity.”

Christmas is not about things — it’s about human relationships.

It is a time to remember and celebrate the birth of love and compassion in the human soul. When all the world awoke to the light of life.

In his song, “Someday at Christmas,” Stevie Wonder wrote: “Hate will be gone and love will prevail.  Someday a new world that we can start with hope in every heart.  Someday all our dreams will come to be. Someday in a world where men are free. Maybe not in time for you and me but someday at Christmas time, someday at Christmas time.”

The Rev. Ernest Mills, Thermal Belt Unitarian Universalists Fellowship