No wonder then, that Christmas renders visible deep ambiguities in our culture: tensions between \u201casceticism and indulgence, simplicity and affluence, piety and spectacle, religion and consumerism, Christ and culture.\u201d <\/span>Women live out these ambiguities in particular ways. They, after all, are the ones who orchestrate and choreograph much of the domesticity of Christmas. They are responsible for much of the nurturance of relationships at Christmas, from hosting Christmas parties to writing cards to family and friends to Christmas gift-giving (and the attendant labor of choosing, buying, wrapping, decorating, and often, transporting or sending the gifts). Moreover, consumer research has shown that in America, women are not only the primary shoppers, they also do the majority of holiday shopping. Women actually start shopping for the holidays earlier than men, but finish just as late. Women also bear most of the burden of other additional holiday preparations: from baking the cookies to getting the kids ready (practicing holiday songs for school concerts, decorating the Christmas tree with children, and making sure that that cooperation harms neither the ornaments nor the children, etc.). The holiday season, then, makes women \u201cnothing if not extremely busy.\u201d<\/p>\n Can the O-Antiphons be anything but antithetical to these activities, yet one more insistence that Christ be put back into Christmas? The O-Antiphons seek to shape our desire toward that midnight hour between the 24th <\/span>and the 25th <\/span>of December when, two millennia ago, God was born in human form. One would think that the desire to witness anew God becoming human in our midst would not need to be awakened, that this desire is, indeed, the deepest longing of our whole existence. The O-Antiphons would then simply call our attention to and speak this deepest longing. As the first of the O-Antiphons puts it: How I long for you, Holy Wisdom, show us wisdom\u2019s ways! Calling on Wisdom, that ancient feminine embodiment of the Divine Presence, could be a particularly compelling vocative for women to begin to speak their desires and deepest longings. \u201cCome, Holy Wisdom,\u201d is, however, by no means the only vocative we hear during this season. In fact, long before the O-Antiphons ever have a chance to shape our desires towards Holy Wisdom, desires have already been constructed for us in myriad ways that even the most astute of us find hard to acknowledge. And the well-meaning Advent sermons that challenge us to resist conspicuous consumption seem to assume that the problem arises at the moment of decision, when we come face to face with a particularly seductive product: to consume or to resist consuming. In reality (and it is the reality particularly of women\u2019s lives in these days before Christmas), the problem emerges much, much earlier. The crucial moment, I would argue, is the construction of our desires, which\u2014if effective\u2014actually disables us from the very choice that many Advent sermons invite us to make. We are beyond choice at the point identified in these Advent sermons, since long before we are confronted with a product, our desires have already been shaped in ways that make that product seem vital to our well-being and flourishing.<\/p>\n
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