I hadn’t planned on blogging about this again, but a couple of interesting articles got me thinking about it some more. The “battle” over Christmas continues, but what exactly is it that these concerned Christians are fighting for? Adam Cohen at the New York Times thinks they’re fighting for a holiday their ancestors would’ve regarded as most un-Christian.

What is less obvious, though, is that Christmas’s self-proclaimed
defenders are rewriting the holiday’s history. They claim that the “traditional” American Christmas is under attack by what John Gibson, another Fox anchor, calls “professional atheists” and “Christian haters.” But America has a complicated history with Christmas, going back to the Puritans, who despised it. What the boycotters are doing is not defending America’s Christmas traditions, but creating a new version of the holiday that fits a political agenda.

He follows this with a short history of the holiday in our country, including fears over it’s ever-increasing commercialzation. So what exactly are these concerned Christians fighting for?

The Christmas that Mr. O’Reilly and his allies are promoting – one
closely aligned with retailers, with a smack-down attitude toward nonobservers – fits with their campaign to make America more like a theocracy, with Christian displays on public property and Christian prayer in public schools.

He does say this trend doesn’t appear to be catching on, and I agree. It really doesn’t help that the conservative leaders most concerned with this are the likes of John Gibson and Bill O’Reilly at Fox News, and “extreme” Christian leaders Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell.

Colbert King at the Washington Post notes this nexus of the Christmas battle and commercialization too:

Silly me! And here I’ve been thinking that Target, Home Depot,
Wal-Mart, Kmart and America’s malls are places where people go this time of year to shop. But thanks to the Rev. Jerry Falwell and others in his wing of Christendom, I now know that those stores are there during the holiday season to serve as places of worship. What other conclusion can be drawn?

Falwell, as he desires his flock to know, wants Americans to do their shopping at stores that greet you with “Merry Christmas” and that celebrate the birthday of Jesus in carols, religious decorations and marketing displays. In my old neighborhood, that used to be called “church.”

As you may or may not know, I’m something of an atheist. Despite that fact, I love Christmas. It’s absolutely my favorite time of year. And despite the fact that I’m generally suspicious of religious mumbo-jumbo, there is nonetheless something awe-inspiring about the story of the birth of Christ. And there are plenty of people like myself who hate the rampant commercialization of Christmas. Cohen mentions how this was a concern to Christians leaders as far back as early last century:

By the 1920′s, the retail industry had adopted Christmas as its own, sponsoring annual ceremonies to kick off the “Christmas shopping season.”Religious leaders objected strongly. The Christmas that emerged had an inherent tension: merchants tried to make it about buying, while clergymen tried to keep commerce out. A 1931 Times roundup of Christmas sermons reported a common theme: “the suggestion that Christmas could not survive if Christ were thrust into the background by materialism.” A 1953 Methodist sermon broadcast on NBC – typical of countless such sermons – lamented that Christmas had become a “profit-seeking period.” This ethic found popular expression in “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” In the 1965 TV special, Charlie Brown ignores Lucy’s advice to “get the biggest aluminum tree you can find” and her assertion that Christmas is “a big commercial racket,” and finds a more spiritual way to observe the day.

Seems to me their fears were justified. I try not to be too bah-humbug about it, but the litany of commercials encouraging people to go out and spend spend spend starting the day after Thanksgiving is wearying. Whether you are religiously inclined or not, such a message dilutes any true “meaning” of Christmas. Honestly, I’d be okay if somebody put a spending cap on Christmas (and I mean a low one) or every other year or so we swore off gift-giving at all. And yet those battling for Christmas aren’t concerned with commercialization; they embrace it. Whether they know it or not, they seem willing to sacrifice the sacred meaning of Christmas to score political points against liberals. And they seem willing to accept the unique phenomenon in our hyper-capitalist society, which embraces every opportunity to turn a sacred day into a day for a sale. It’s too bad really, because fighting for a the real spirit of Christmas is something that I think both liberals and conservatives, Christian and non-Christian, could get behind.

And so it begins…the annual tradition of “defending” Christmas from craven secularists who want to ban it:

“The Rev. Jerry Falwell is marshaling his forces to keep ‘Merry Christmas,’, ‘Silent Night’ and other religious references from being banished this holiday season.

Mr. Falwell, founder of Liberty University and the Moral Majority Coalition, has e-mailed 500,000 followers to urge support for the ‘Friend or Foe Christmas Campaign,’ aimed at public officials, schools and retailers.

Because of course when it comes to Christmas…you’re either for or against it.

They’ve already scored one “victory”:

“Mr. Falwell has declared the campaign a success. The biggest skirmish has come in Boston, where complaints that a city Web site referred to a ‘holiday tree’ resulted in a switch to ‘Christmas tree.’

‘The Boston Christmas tree issue was a minor thing, but had it been allowed to stand, it would have sent a signal across the nation that people of faith should not be allowed public expression,’ Mr. Falwell said.”

Despite the fact that the country is virtually draped in red and green and silver and blue from the Thanksgiving weekend(or Halloween in the retail sector) until sometime around the middle of January, there are still those that insist if you’re not celebrating Christmas enough, then you must be in favor of abolishing any public celebration of the holiday. This of course is ridiculous, for reasons I explained in my post on this very issue last year. I’d really like to avoid starting my own holiday tradition of attacking those who are defending Christmas; too much of that and I’ll be arguing with people over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin or what one hand clapping sounds like. But somehow, it puts me in the holiday spirit to blog about this.

P.S. Is there any irony to the fact that I’m listening to Christmas music as I write this?

Well…it appears that Charles Krauthammer and I aren’t the only ones talking about whether or not there’s enough Christ in Christmas.



Frank Rich has a very good column over at the NY Times about this. As I said in my earlier post, I thought this reactionary movement to “restore” Christmas had become a holiday tradition, but apparantly it’s been stepped up since the Christian conservative “victory” in the Presidential election.



Yet if you watch the news and listen to certain politicians, especially since Election Day, you’ll hear an ever-growing drumbeat that Christianity is under siege in America. Like Mr. Gibson, the international movie star who portrayed himself as a powerless martyr to a shadowy anti- Christian conspiracy in the run-up to the release of “The Passion,” his fellow travelers on the right detect a sinister plot — of secularists, “secular Jews” and “elites” — out to destroy the religion followed by more than four out of every five Americans.



Dana Stevens over at Slate also has something to say in her TV MemeWatch column:



The new gauntlet-throwing catch phrase from the right is “Merry Christmas” (can’t you just see Eastwood saying it from behind the barrel of a gun?). Apparently, uttered in the right context—like on Fox News—those four syllables no longer convey simply holiday cheer, but a red-state/blue-state, my-god-is-better-than-yours challenge…



And in this article at the Dallas News, some parents in an Oklahoma City suburb cut their own noses off to spite their face:



Dismayed that a Nativity, or depiction of Christ’s birth in a manger, was ordered cut by the superintendent, some voters in this growing, southwest Oklahoma City suburb retaliated by helping block passage of the bonds. Those bonds included money for a new elementary school that would ease crowding.



Sigh. What to say? The conservative Christmas cops, emboldened by the 22% of voters who may or may not have voted on some sort of issue of morality, are now running around like the Wahabbi morality police of Saudi fame looking for every possible instance in which they can be victimized by liberal, secularist, atheistic fanatics who want to replace Christ with a Kwanzaa display. But I think Rich sums up the larger purpose best:



What is this about? How can those in this country’s overwhelming religious majority maintain that they are victims in a fiery battle with forces of darkness? It is certainly not about actual victimization. Christmas is as pervasive as it has ever been in America, where it wasn’t even declared a federal holiday until after the Civil War. What’s really going on here is yet another example of a post-Election-Day winner-takes-all power grab by the “moral values” brigade. As Mr. Gibson shrewdly contrived his own crucifixion all the way to the bank, trumping up nonexistent threats to his movie to hype it, so the creation of imagined enemies and exaggerated threats to Christianity by “moral values” mongers of the right has its own secular purpose. The idea is to intimidate and marginalize anyone who objects to their efforts to impose the most conservative of Christian dogma on public policy. If you’re against their views, you don’t have a differing opinion — you’re anti-Christian (even if you are a Christian).



That explanation makes sense to me. Unlike the unwitting and naive residents of Mustang, Oklahoma, many of the pundits and commentators know exactly what they’re doing. They know that if they can push this image of Christian victimization, then hardly anyone will be able to object when they demand that the school play tell the story of Jesus, or that the school mural include images of angels hanging over the manger, for fear that they’ll be forced to explain why they hate Christianity. Again, it’s a nasty and underhanded ploy to get by deception(in casting themselves as victims)what would otherwise be against the law.



And this may sound inflammatory to some, but this situation isn’t without historical parallel. The Nazis employed the same tactic quite effectively against the Jews, casting them a threats to the German state and German “purity” despite the fact that Germans were an overwhelming majority who held the liberty of the Jews in the palm of their hands, as a precursor to imposing even more severe restrictions on Jews then already existed, and eventually the Holocaust. Obviously that’s not going to happen here; none of us have to worry about a Christian theocracy rounding up secularists anytime soon. But it’s the same idea, and the same tactics. It was despicable and underhanded then, and it’s despicable and underhanded now.

In today’s Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer joins ranks of those who worry about the repression of yule-tide celebration in this country.



It is Christmastime, and what would Christmas be without the usual platoon of annoying pettifoggers rising annually to strip Christmas of any Christian content? With some success:



School districts in New Jersey and Florida ban Christmas carols. The mayor of Somerville, Mass., apologizes for “mistakenly” referring to the town’s “holiday party” as a “Christmas party.” The Broward and Fashion malls in South Florida put up a Hanukah menorah but no nativity scene. The manager of one of the malls explains: Hanukah commemorates a battle and not a religious event, though he hastens to add, “I really don’t know a lot about it.” He does not. Hanukah commemorates a miracle, and there is no event more “religious” than a miracle.



Sigh. Every year we get commentators writing about this issue, about the supposed “repression” of Christmas celebrations in public settings, and how this once again illustrates the attempts of an intolerant minority to prevent good-hearted Christians from celebrating the holiday as they see fit. Frankly this is becoming as much a holiday tradition as “It’s a Wonderful Life.”



I don’t know about you, but I don’t see much in the way of Christmas repression this time of year. Walking around town I see Christmas lights and decorations on homes, people wearing Christmas-themed attire, Christmas music on the radio, Christmas decorations hanging from Union Station, people saying “Merry Christmas” to each other in the streets..and so on and so on. In other words, this time of year the country is inundated with Christmas, and I sympathize with the Scrooges among us who have to watch our country go from red, white and blue to red and green! So, I really can’t relate to Krauthammer and his indignation by pointing out a few examples where people have admittedly gone just a little overboard in not offending anyone. These few examples are not a sign that anybody is attempting to roll-back Christmas, as if such a thing could even be done in the first place.



Anyway…get over it Krauthammer. There’s plenty of Christmas to go around.