This Season's War
Cry:
Commercialize
Christmas, or Else
By ADAM COHEN,
Editorial Observer, NYTimes on the Web, December 4, 2005
Religious conservatives have a cause
this holiday season: the commercialization of Christmas. They're for
it.
The American Family Association is leading a boycott of Target for not using the
words "Merry Christmas" in its advertising. (Target denies it has an
anti-Merry-Christmas policy.) The Catholic League boycotted Wal-Mart in
part over the way its Web site treated searches for "Christmas." Bill
O'Reilly, the Fox anchor who last year started a "Christmas Under Siege"
campaign, has a chart on his Web site of stores that use the phrase "Happy
Holidays," along with a poll that asks, "Will you shop at stores that do not say
'Merry Christmas'?"
This campaign -- which is being hyped on Fox and conservative talk radio -- is
an odd one. Christmas remains ubiquitous, and with its celebrators in
control of the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court and every state supreme
court and legislature, it hardly lacks for powerful supporters. There is
also something perverse, when Christians are being jailed for discussing the
Bible in Saudi Arabia and slaughtered in Sudan, about spending so much energy on
stores that sell "holiday trees."
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.
The Puritans considered Christmas un-Christian, and hoped to keep it out of
America. They could not find Dec. 25 in the Bible, their sole source of
religious guidance, and insisted that the date derived from Saturnalia, the
Roman heathens' wintertime celebration. On their first Dec. 25 in the New
World, in 1620, the Puritans worked on building projects and ostentatiously
ignored the holiday. From 1659 to 1681 Massachusetts went further, making
celebrating Christmas "by forbearing of labor, feasting or in any other way" a
crime.
The concern that Christmas distracted from religious piety continued even after
Puritanism waned. In 1827, an Episcopal bishop lamented that the Devil had
stolen Christmas "and converted it into a day of worldly festivity, shooting and
swearing." Throughout the 1800's, many religious leaders were still trying
to hold the line. As late as 1855, New York newspapers reported that
Presbyterian, Baptist and Methodist churches were closed on Dec. 25 because
"they do not accept the day as a Holy One." On the eve of the Civil War,
Christmas was recognized in just 18 states.
Christmas gained popularity when it was transformed into a domestic celebration,
after the publication of Clement Clarke Moore's "Visit from St. Nicholas" and
Thomas Nast's Harper's Weekly drawings, which created the image of a
white-bearded Santa who gave gifts to children. The new emphasis lessened
religious leaders' worries that the holiday would be given over to drinking and
swearing, but it introduced another concern: commercialism. 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.
This year's Christmas "defenders" are not just tolerating commercialization --
they're insisting on it. They are also rewriting Christmas history on
another key point: non-Christians' objection to having the holiday forced
on them.
The campaign's leaders insist this is a new phenomenon -- a "liberal plot," in
Mr. Gibson's words. But as early as 1906, the Committee on Elementary
Schools in New York City urged that Christmas hymns be banned from the
classroom, after a boycott by more than 20,000 Jewish students. In 1946,
the Rabbinical Assembly of America declared that calling on Jewish children to
sing Christmas carols was "an infringement on their rights as Americans."
Other non-Christians have long expressed similar concerns. For decades,
companies have replaced "Christmas parties" with "holiday parties," schools have
adopted "winter breaks" instead of "Christmas breaks," and TV stations and
stores have used phrases like "Happy Holidays" and "Season's Greetings" out of
respect for the nation's religious diversity.
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.
It does not, however, appear to be catching on with the public. That may
be because most Americans do not recognize this commercialized, mean-spirited
Christmas as their own. Of course, it's not even clear the campaign's
leaders really believe in it. Just a few days ago, Fox News's online store
was promoting its "Holiday Collection" for shoppers. Among the items
offered to put under a "holiday tree" was "The O'Reilly Factor Holiday
Ornament." After bloggers pointed this out, Fox changed the "holidays" to
"Christmases."
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