Star Wars and Christmas

This Christmas season toy shelves will be jam packed, already are jam packed, with Star Wars toys. Some of the Legos are already in my household. I know of a young couple with joint custody of a BB-8.  A trip to the Disney shopping outlet at Disney World had an entire room devoted to lightsabers, T-shirts, action figures, Legos, toy spaceships and even a lumpy, potato-like creature with no name and nothing to make him the least bit appealing except that he has a label announcing that he will make an appearance in Episode 7, The Force Awakens.

And I’ll admit it, I’ve bought in. Literally. I already have my tickets to a 7pm December 17th XL showing at our local multiscreen theater. All Star Wars movies until now have been released in late May, so the December release date has given me reason to reflect on how much Star Wars and Christmas have in common. When I have mentioned this connection to people, they seem baffled. But I think there is merit to my comparison.

I need to start by acknowledging that the two phenomena, Christmas and Star Wars are at heart, very different.

Christmas began as a celebration of the birth of Christ and was designed to transform the pagan yuletide-winter solstice holiday into a Christian one. In the 1800’s the popularity of the holiday was actually on the wane until Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol. While didn’t single-handedly save Christmas, he did turn it into the cultural holiday it is today, though I doubt he would have predicted or approved of the extreme commercialism the modern holiday has bred. It didn’t begin with commercialism, unless you are one of the cynics who views the two gospel accounts that actually have Christmas stories as brilliant marketing tools. Yet if Christmas didn’t start in consumerism, it has certainly ended there, despite 50 years of Linus telling us otherwise on A Charlie Brown Christmas.

Star Wars, on the other hand, began as an attempt to remake the old Flash Gordon serials. When that failed, George Lucas decided to tap into something older: the mythic archetypes popularized by Joseph Campbell in the 1970’s. He dressed up the ancient stories of heroes living in an ordinary world, being called to adventure, and changing the world, and set them in a past (a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away) that was also the future. Yet despite those mythic roots, Star Wars has always been, from the start, commercial. Lucas, in a 1977 interview admitted that he set out to create something that would sell a lot of merchandise. Succeed, he did.

So that’s a rough estimate of how both phenomena got started. Why in heaven or on earth would I want to compare them?

Well, for starters, the commercialism issue. Let’s face it, our entire economy, at least according to news-casts, appears to depend entirely on how much stuff we sell around Christmas time. All merchandise sells at Christmas time, but even limiting our view to Christmas-themed merchandise, the mind boggles. Christmas sweaters, deliberately ugly Christmas sweaters, collector’s ornaments, Advent calendars, designer manger scenes, crazy lighting displays, Christmas albums, special holiday editions of various cookies, crackers, snacks, and Ziplock bags. And special holiday packaged and flavored coffee creamers. I just recently saw a Christmas sweater that had jingle bells strategically placed in the nipple zone. It read “Jingle My Bells.” Classy. What does any of this have to do with a baby born in a manger? Absolutely nothing. But of course, no one, so far as I know, has a firm legal handle on the merchandising of all things Christmas. Star Wars is another story.

LucasFilm, Ltd. has had a firm grip on merchandising all things Star Wars since 1977. It was part of Lucas’s deal with 20th Century Fox, and his company brilliantly exploited their intellectual property. Nobody merchandised better than LucasFilm. Except one company. Disney. And Disney just bought LucasFilm.

Here’s the weird thing: Star Wars merchandise strays just as far from its source material as Christmas merchandise does. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think the companies were doing everything in their power to make you not take Star Wars the least bit seriously. You can by Darth Vader helmets with Mickey Mouse ears, play sets that recast the Star Wars actors with Mickey and the gang or the Muppets. There have been Jar-Jar Binks twirling lollipops, Darth Vader cookie jars, M&M dispensers, and Pez dispensers. There are funny Star Wars T-shirts like the one declaring the 5-day weather forecast on Alderaan, with the last two days left blank. Ha! Millions of people died in the context of the story, but now it’s just a joke. But I laughed when I saw it. Oddest of all is the attitude toward Darth Vader in the new merchandising. Vader is arguably one of the greatest Villains in movie history (the American Film Institute rated him 3rd after Hannibal Lecter and Norman Bates), but he is also now the butt of T-shirt humor. He can be seen scrubbing his own helmet with Windex, poking a pinata with his lightsaber, telling Princess Leia to pull his finger, and sculpting a Death Star topiary. Disney corporate synergy now has him riding the Dumbo ride at the Magic Kingdom while eating a Mickey Mouse ice cream on a stick, among other theme-parky activities. And, of course, I currently have in my refrigerator Darth Vader Mocha Espresso Coffee Mate Coffee Creamer. It’s delicious.

Then there’s the question of televised Christmas and televised Star Wars. Televised Christmas specials range from the classic (A Charlie Brown Christmas and How the Grinch Stole Christmas) to the ridiculous (Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer and The He-Man and She-Ra Christmas Special). Star Wars, of course, has only the legendary Star Wars Holiday Special, with nothing positive to balance it out. There are good Star Wars TV shows, and middling ones, just like Christmas specials come in a wide range.

In other words, Christmas and Star Wars are both great big messes of merchandising, tacky commercialism, bad television, and money-grubbing.

But here’s the thing. Move away from all that, closer to the original thing itself, and you get two things.

One of those things is music. Christmas music, of course, has its own tacky, terrible novelty songs, but if you go to the actual carols, there is a kind of haunting, deep longing in them that I think many people find moving whether they are religious or not. “Oh, Little Town of Bethlehem,” “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear,” and “In the Bleak Midwinter” all evoke a feeling of numinous for many of us. John Williams's Star Wars score, spanning over six movies (soon to be 7) evokes the same kind of deep longing at its best. The Force theme, the theme that plays as Luke Skywalker watches the setting suns over Tatooine, conjures up the same sense of mystery and longing as the most profound Christmas carols.

Mystery. In a sense, that is what lies at the heart of the best of both Star Wars and Christmas. When you hear the Christmas stories re-read, whether by Linus or at a Christmas Eve service, they evoke something older and more mysterious than the mere words on a page seem capable of evoking. Star Wars, somehow, manages to do the same thing. An amusing YouTube video of the second Episode 7 preview intersperses the preview with shots of Matthew McConaughey's character from Interstellar crying as he watches video messages from home. The effect in the YouTube video is that he is crying because seeing the new Star Wars preview is obviously a quasi-religious experience. And the response to people for the final preview has been just as rapturous. The events of the original trilogy are now mythic, even in the Star Wars galaxy. And so when Han Solo tells the new characters “It’s true, all of it,” I find myself inexplicably moved. Star Wars may have been born in the squalor of commercialism. Jesus may have been born in the squalor of a stable. Yet they both seem to transcend their origins.

Star Wars is fiction. We know that. But it is based on ancient myths. There are those who claim that the Christmas story is based on older, pagan myths. That may be the fact of the matter. But somehow, they both point, as the old myths do, to ancient truths that can’t be pinned down. “It’s all true,” Han Solo says. And what he seems to be saying for all of us is that what’s true is that our lives are epic tales. We are all heroes, even if we don’t face Sith Lords and blow up Death Stars. The Christmas Myth says something similar. The holy is found in the ordinary. Being human matters.

And in the end, all the commercialism in the world can’t ruin either of them. Even the tackiest Alvin and the Chipmunks song, even the dulcet tones of “What do you buy a wookiee for Christmas (When He Already Has a Comb)?” are part of the big, messy deals that are Christmas and Star Wars. They add to the fun, but can’t cover up the Myth. The Myth survives, not in the modern Myth-Busters sense, but in the C.S. Lewis Mythical sense of deep truth. It’s true. All of it.

Even if I’m sipping my Darth Vader espresso flavored coffee and listening to “Rockin Around the Christmas Tree.”