Reshuffling the Three Cs of Christmas, Or: What about the Work of Christmas?
Joerg Rieger
December 20, 2025
Each year, the Wendland-Cook Program shares a Christmas reflection from our Founding Director, Joerg Rieger (2021, 2022, 2023, 2024), that invites us to engage with the Christ story and think critically about its contemporary significance. In this year’s piece, Rieger reflects on what it means to “keep Christ in Christmas” amid the realities of consumerism, capitalism, and modern Christian practice. Returning to the social and economic tensions at the heart of the Christ event, the piece offers a thoughtful reflection on work, solidarity, and justice that speaks both critically and constructively to our present moment.
Even a casual observer might notice that Christmas in the United States often revolves around three Cs: consumerism, capitalism, and Christ, in that order. Having just walked amidst Christmas decorations in Pretoria and Johannesburg, South Africa, and now in Singapore, that impression resonates globally as well.
Whatever people’s religious beliefs, for many, the holiday season is driven first and foremost by consumption. It often begins early with “baby’s first Christmas.” The second C, capitalism, thrives on this because its success depends on the first: consumption fuels production, and production exists to product profit. This leaves the third c, Christ, attached as an afterthought, only included in this picture as an appendage. Many churches, at least in the United States, take Christmas Day off and tread lightly on Christmas Eve leaving plenty of space for consumption and capitalism to dominate.
In this climate, some Christians promote efforts to “keep Christ in Christmas.” But even if a few recognize the tensions between Christ, capitalism, and consumerism, stepping away from capitalism and consumption for a day—or even a season—doesn’t take us very far. Capitalism’s relentless push for consumption cannot be kept at arm’s length forever. Its engine—uneven labor relations—powers the entire system, and that beating heart of the capitalist economy will catch up with us sooner rather than later.
Worse yet, in 2025 much of Christianity in the United States has sunk to new lows. Today, “keeping Christ in Christmas” often amounts to little more than rubbing worn-out ideas of Christ in the faces of those who aren’t Christian. Chubby little baby Jesuses with rosy cheeks and blond hair, or Christs with dreamy gazes in long night-gown-like outfits populate the imagination—figures that reveal almost nothing about Christ, but everything about the Christians who imagine them. For some, keeping Christ in Christmas means little more than keeping around Santa Claus in his Coke-can-colored outfit.
It is time to abandon worn-out Christmas images and take things back to the conflict at the heart of the Christ event. For many Jewish contemporaries of Jesus, the trouble with Jesus was not that he claimed to be the Messiah but how he exercised that role. According to the precepts of dominant Jewish religion of the day, the Messiah had to be a king-like figure and Jesus was anything but that. For Roman contemporaries of Jesus, practioners of another dominant religion, the problem with Jesus was not that some human being was declared divine but that this particular human being did not fit imperial images of the divine
When considered in this light, putting Christ in Christmas means turning to a Christ who stands in solidarity not with the rulers but with the ruled—the majority of humans who have to work for a living, both then and now. In this way, an economy where capital assumes the rule over all of life—isn’t that what capitalism ultimately amounts to?—is exposed as both anti-Christmas and anti-Christ. The same is true for the kind of consumption that is driven not by need but by desires created by the rule of profit. To be sure, consuming is not the problem, and neither is prosperity. The problem is prosperity for the few rather than the many and the manipulation of desires so that consumption appears to be insatiable.
Jesus as the Christ or as the Messiah (both meaning “anointed” respectively in Greek and Hebrew) is concerned about people being able to produce the kind of prosperity that allows all to live decent lives (John 10:10b). Likewise, Jesus as the Christ or as the Messiah is concerned about people’s ability to work and consume what they need (Matt. 20:1-16). This is what reshuffling the three Cs of Christmas and reintroducing Christ into Christmas means. The point is not making others conform to status quo Christianity; rather, it is a matter of making Christianity conform to a Christ who challenges imperial hopes and images and transforms them into something else altogether.
After all, it is hardly an accident that God opted to become incarnate in a family of construction workers on Christmas day.
Let’s read the old stories again from that perspective, this time starting with his mother Mary as a working person rather than as a member of nobility, as Charlotte Jacobs suggests here.