No Brandon on that tree

 

Let’s go, Brandon! has become a popular slogan among those who persist in believing Joe Biden stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump, and other such foolishness. If you don’t know what it means, I’ll just say this: it’s a substitute (a “minced oath,” to use a phrase I have just learned) for as derogatory and offensive a three-word epithet as one might hurl in English against Joe Biden as a person.

Around Thanksgiving my spam filter caught an email from an outfit selling Let’s go Brandon!-inscribed Christmas tree ornaments. This “limited edition ornament is made of ceramic and makes for an excellent stocking stuffer, plus a few joyful laughs.” All that for 50% off during the “Christmas Hot Sale.” Not to mention a “30-day money back guarantee.”

To hang on your Christmas tree! That’s right, your CHRISTmas tree, as in JESUS CHRIST’s tree.

People can, and do, put decorations not having much to do with Jesus or Christmas on their trees. For years, my wife has insisted on hanging a Pittsburgh Steelers’ Franco Harris ornament on our tree. I keep peace in our household by accepting it in silence. Besides, there is the matter of that “immaculate reception,” as all Steeler fans know.

But Let’s go Brandon! on a Christmas tree first puzzles and finally angers me. It just doesn’t belong there, even as a similar obscenity about former President Trump, whether in code not, would not belong there.

There is no room on a Christmas tree for the denigration of another human being for any reason, just as there was no room in the heart of Jesus for belittling anyone.

For Christians, Christmas is about the embodiment of God in human flesh and human affairs in the particular, historic person, Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus’s life, values, practices, and teachings reveal what God intended for us all from the start, and intends for us still.

Although Jesus did display anger, frustration, and disappointment with many whom he encountered, whether disciples, or the curious, or even his self-identified enemies, off the top of my head, I cannot remember Jesus ever cursing another human being. A fig tree, yes. But another human being? I don’t think so.

Neither did Jesus ever seem to fear anyone. Perhaps that is why he never needed to curse them. Could it be that Let’s go Brandon! is a slogan born of fear—fear of Biden’s success, fear of our being wrong?

Practically our entire society embraces Christmas, if not for its theological meaning, then for broader goods and goals that it seems to signify. I have no problem with that. Once a year we all are invited to recognize one who models for us the kind of human being most of us know in our hearts that we should be in our living. For a brief moment we hope that we and our kindred might one day be and live that way. And when we inevitably backslide—usually before the tree comes down— the hope is remembered as it was felt just long enough to know it was there, is possible, and is worth pursuing.

To create and market a decoration for a Christmas tree that curses another human being is oxymoronic behavior. It suggests our merely political divides are so interwoven with our misappropriated religious convictions that we cannot see the humanity of a person with whom we differ. It is to deny Christ, and Christmas, too. I cannot imagine any authentic follower of Jesus putting Let’s go Brandon! on their Christmas tree, or responding to it with the “joyful laugh” its purveyors promise.

I can imagine the baby Jesus rolling over in his manger at the very idea of it.

(If you’ve ordered yours, take heart: you have 30 days to return it. But return it before it spends time on your tree, not after. That would be stealing.)