Happy endings require love, but the love folks are looking for is either in short supply or surprisingly unsatisfying when found. Christmas is a holiday for loving the movies tell us, but love is pretty hard to find.
As Love Actually points out “love is all around” in virtual reality, but there is too little love in reality and it is too limited scope. Instead of love being a means to a goal, it has become the goal. 
We want the perfect holiday, but we actually search for the perfect “stuff” to give as gifts. We crave love, but the media has taught us that love is just sex. Dawkins and his merry band of atheists are often embraced by college students looking for liberation from “rules” . . . only to discover that love has been reduced to one selfish gene looking for another selfish gene to make it to the next generation and that free will has vanished.
Earlier cultures, both Christian and non-Christian, would be amazed to see the time Americans spend looking for the ideal present and perfect sex and how little time they spend cultivating their souls.
If Plato longed for goodness, truth, and beauty in his pagan culture, many Christians long only for personal satisfaction and a good marriage. Any discussion of abstaining from physical desire, material or sexual, must either be tied to physical health or it is viewed suspiciously. Many Americans who react in horror at the “legalism” and rigor of fasting for Advent in order to shape their souls will easily agree to consume nothing but chalky milkshakes in a can weeks on end for their physical health.
Perhaps Christmas disappoints modern Americans because there is no feast without the fast and we have forgotten spiritual disciplines in order to party longer.
Talk of abstaining from “stuff” or from sex for the sake of the soul sounds bizarre to Christians and non-Christians, but it is in both the Bible and the great classical philosophers. Material goods can be enjoyed, but they can also get in the way of spiritual goods. Sexuality has been so separated from love and so commoditized that just about everything is sold using sex appeal. North Americans are awash in erotic talk, but the gentle and telling old phrase “making love” has nearly vanished.
This has progressed to the point that even the least educated should find something bizarre and unnatural about a culture utterly turned to physical pleasures while enjoying it less. Eating is more and more disconnected from nutrition. Most fast food is neither. Sexuality is cut off from making babies. A recent Fox News report on college sexuality did not mention marriage or child rearing once and there are no nursing bras at Victoria’s Secret. When not hawking sexuality and food, Americans are encouraged to drink pints of alcohol to the point that alcoholism has become a raging problem amongst college students. Love of money and the belief that enough things can make a person happy, induces people to work longer and longer hours while living for the weekend.
Every desire is quickly met or a special interest group, store at the mall, or support group opens to fill the gap, but humans are not flourishing. This failed mall culture is the cult of the False Christmas. . . that reduces Saint Nicholas to Santa . . . and demands nothing but our credit cards. . . and then leaves us broke with empty souls.
It is no wonder that fairy tales seem false in such a culture and Christmas can be a let down.
Fairy tales, rooted in ancient wisdom, suggest that only through sacrifice and pain of such pleasures can deepest human desire be fulfilled. Dorothy and Odysseus must suffer many trials and sorrows before they reach home. Sadly, an addiction to short-term physical pleasures leaves little time for what even the ancient pagans would have called the higher pleasures. Simple entertainments consume all the time needed to master greater excellence. With access to more information than has ever been at the available, most Americans are less mentally flexible than a Victorian high school student.
Calling some love or pleasure “less” does not condemn it. Simple pleasures are good in their place and can be excellent preparation for greater joy. Popular culture is the breeding ground for high culture and can be enjoyed for its own sake. First grade math is simpler and “less than” calculus, but a student must learn to do basic math in order to understand the higher. Nor do students discard the lesser once they master the higher. Math professors still use addition and subtraction when they balance their checking accounts. If some loves are more difficult to master than others that does not detract from the appropriate pleasure of the “lesser.”
Saint Paul could advise married couples to forgo sexuality for a time in order to experience the joy of prayer. Jesus Christ could urge a rich man to “sell all” in order to gain spiritual reward.
It is not that prayer is contrary to sexuality or salvation impossible for the rich man, but that time and psychic energy are limited.
Perhaps the culture of immediate fulfillment of desire is hostile to the fairy tales of childhood and real Christmas . . . and the cynicism and disappointment of life is tied to this error. Either the fairy tales are true or the mass culture (which perversely sold fairy tales and Christmas to children in film in the first place) is correct. Men and women are caught in the middle.
Anyone who has tried to save instead of spend, fast so as to feast, and learn a difficult art knows how hard it is to sacrifice short term pleasures for long term gain. This is why the Bible and the Church Fathers often speak in “the prophetic extreme” against an obsession with the physical pleasures (stuff, food, sex). No culture, Victorian or modern, can miss being aware of these desires, but plenty of people miss other pleasures.
It is easy to never learn enough music to experience the beauty of a great sonata or discipline their minds enough to have a stimulating conversation with a good friend. These higher pleasures can easily be missed and sages that love their fellow men are eager to point the way to such high joy.
Of course, some few will always go too far and embrace the Gnostic heresy, condemned by the Bible and Church councils, that physical pleasures are base or should be abandoned by all Christians, but this is a sin most Americans need not fear committing. For every extreme ascetic, modern culture produces one hundred sensualists. More of us are becoming Homer Simpson and not monks.
Expectations about what will fulfill deepest human desires are raised by the media consumed and it is overwhelmingly centered on a single theme. Music, television, and movies only know one kind of love. With rare exceptions (often for children) like Finding Nemo, plots come back to “sexual tension” between the characters (Scully and Mulder, Jack Bauer and Audrey Raines) where boy meets girl and the meeting culminates in sexuality. There is a giant dearth of creativity and many of the other human loves are simply ignored or treated as foreplay to romantic love. The problem is not in celebrating the passion of lovers, but that this is almost the only passion about which folk speak. Even the pagan Greeks and the better Romans (such as Cicero) would have been appalled at this tedious monomania.
It is not wonder that the true Christmas story disappoints our culture. There are no car chases . . . and it is a virgin that conceives and has a Son.
The love is chaste . . . material goods are given to God in flesh as an act of worship. . . and all of it leads to real human happiness!
The reason fairy tales disappoint maturing moderns is that their basic message is hidden by their simplification in modern retellings and contradicted by competing cultural assumptions. The ancient stories, including the Biblical account of Christmas, assume that goodness, truth, and beauty are the final goals for men and women.
Much of American culture is at war with the reality such old stories proclaim. Love should be about forever, but American society, driven by consumerism, rewards the immediate and urges novelty over longevity. Fairy Tales do not merely talk about romance between lovers, but about other things. These other things are often missing in modern retellings and this sets ancient tales up for a fall.
Disney’s Beauty and the Beast is one of the greatest films of all time, but it severely distorts the fairy tale on which it is based. The film Beauty and the Beast has perverted the original story’s folk wisdom and its connection to reality. When I first went to see Beauty and the Beast, it was with the original folk tale in mind. The musically stunning opening number featured a young woman singing that she wanted so much more than “this provincial life” and I knew what was coming next . . . or thought I did.
The ancient Beauty and the Beast is the story of a family with several daughters. One daughter is humble and knows her place, but the other daughters are vain and desire more than they have. When their father loses his wealth, the wicked daughters are unhappy, but the godly daughter is content. The father regains his riches and the bad sisters demand costly gifts while the pious younger daughter demands nothing but a single red rose. In the end, the patience and humility of the justly named Belle, whose form matches her soul, are rewarded. Beauty’s Christian, sacrificial, love transforms even a Beast and she is revealed as fit to rule.
In the Disney film this message is turned on its head. The common folk are crude in the style of their animation and in their characters. Small town, provincial values and folk wisdom, are shown ridiculous and stifling. Belle is rewarded for being discontent with her lot and recognizing her own superiority. In the end, the only people she loves, her father and the Beast, are aided because she loves them and she is a superior creature. The townspeople are annihilated and Belle is left to rule in a castle with her prince. It is her love of self that motivates her love of others. Because she is self-confident, she can love those wise enough to see her true value. She demands more of life than she has and she gets it.
It is not the fairy tales that lie. It is the modern telling of them, close enough to still resonate, but subtly changed that fail. Beauty and the Beast is a lovely film, but full of falsehoods. It has value as a work of art, but little value as a reflection of reality. Still, isn’t this simply all my opinion? Who am I to say what is right when it comes to aesthetic goodness, truth, or beauty?
Discovering this is the key to happiness this Christmas.