Here we go again. It’s become a yearly tradition. Led by Bill O’Reilly, theocon elitists denounce the War on Christmas wherein liberal secularists, aided and abetted by wimpy retailers, are striving to deChristianize the holiday by getting one and all to use neutral greetings such as Happy Holidays and Seasons Greetings rather than Merry Christmas.
As Max Blumenthal at The Daily Beast has exposed, the ‘War on Christmas’ campaign goes back to white nationalist Peter Brimelow’s 1995 book Alien Nation; Brimelow has since descended from a Fortune magazine editor to founder of the leading anti-immigrant web site, VDare, which the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as a hate group. But the problems with the Christmas holiday go back a lot further than that.
December 25th is not really about the birth of Christ. Never has been. The Bible makes no mention of the time of year his family was on the road, and it certainly was not in the dead of winter when even Holy Land weather is too severe for the Romans to have ordered the citizens to travel. Nor did the early Christians focus Christ’s birthday, they put a lot more effort into the much more theologically critical death and revival of the Son of God on Easter. Christmas was invented by the Roman Church as a means of displacing and taming the pagan winter solstice celebrations -- that is why the holiday is so heavily influenced by pagan elements (all the stuff about the Yule for instance), and why it occurs at the wrong time of the year. Many Protestant sects have opposed the theologically dubious holiday to the point of outlawing it at some times and places, Puritan dominated regions of the American colonies included. Here is something the theocon elites are not likely to bother to tell you. After the revolution American in general were particularly averse to Christmas celebrations. Why? Because that was something those perfidious Brits did!
What many imagine was the traditional, nuclear family centered Christmas celebration free from nonChristian contamination never truly existed. Prior to the early 1800s it was a rather rowdy affair in which lower class folk went around ‘caroling’ --usually well sloshed on ‘holiday cheer’ -- and ‘requesting’ treats from their economic betters (today’s much more innocuous but still sometimes annoying caroling is what’s leftover). And that was when the campaign to make Christmas the secular event we know and love began. What O’Reilly and company do not realize – because of enthusiastic ignorance, or cynical duplicity, or both -- is about whom is primarily to blame for reengineering Christmas into what it has become.
The great mercantile campaign to transform the religious holiday into a commercial festival began in England and America back in the early 1800s. For one thing, there was all that raucous caroling tradition to be suppressed. More importantly, a growing middle class produced by the emerging industrial age had disposable cash on hand. But retailers were having a hard time squeezing it out of their pockets. Why not emphasize the gift giving aspect of the gospel birth story and see if folks could be encouraged to put down cold cash for presents to friends and relatives? What was needed was some propaganda. As per the 1822 standard "Twas the night before Christmas..." tale that turned holy Saint Nicholas into a gift-distributing fictional elf whose promises to the kids had to be kept by their nonfictional parents. Dicken’s masterpiece A Christmas Carol more than anything else established the new notion of Christmas as a secular nuclear family holiday. Coca-Cola’s seasonal advertising would help finish the transformation of Santa Claus in into the fat, jolly materialist by the mid 1900s. During WW II Big Crosby’s crooning "White Christmas" in Holiday Inn, and Judy Garland’s heart breaking rendition of "Have a Merry Little Christmas" in See You in St. Louis, further cemented the modern concept of the family day. In the 50s and 60s a middle class relieved to be out of the depression and world wars could not help but celebrate their marvelous prosperity by throwing piles of goods at their baby boomer offspring and each other Christmas morning. During those years Christmas to this child was about the wonderful lighted tree draped in silver tinsel, the neat Santa and reindeer display Dad enthusiastically built outside, the lit candles lining the sidewalks in the new suburb in Fairfax VA on Christmas Eve, the anticipation and the actuality of the marvelous morning of a cascade of presents from Santa et al., visiting relatives, New Year’s Eve, the excellent big break from school. The birth of the baby Jesus? Ehhhhh. Going to church on the 25th? A mere Tom Sawyerian annoyance if we bothered to do it. The mercantile project has been fantastically successful as the commercial nature of the Christmas season becomes ever more deeply entrenched. As Lucy Van Belt explains in the A Charlie Brown Christmas, "Look Charlie Brown, let’s face it. We all know Christmas is a big commercial racket --- it’s run by a big eastern syndicate, you know." Lucy was far more correct than Linus who later in the program cited scripture in an effort to focus on the nativity story, which was promptly ignored as the plot turned to events surrounding the tree.
Here is where the theocons are being a bunch of cynics ignorant and or duplicitous. It is no secret that the folks who have been leading the war on Christmas as a religious event are capitalists whose aim is to extract as much money from the proceedings as they can. Xmas – the X by the way was an early Christian symbol used by the Emperor Constantine’s Holy army -- has been captured by capital, which has remade it into a massive retail affair central to the economic health of a nation that two thirds of which consists of consumer spending. It’s a huge matter fretted over by financial kingpins, the worried yet hopeful CEOs, and presidents looking to cover their political behinds. Each fall the business pundits and reporters start speculating about how well the merchants from mom and pops to the country wide chains will do during the coming holiday season, with Christmas the main event, augmented by the minor Jewish holiday Hanukah, the new black Kwanzaa, and to an amusingly perturbing degree the Festivus made famous by a Seinfeld episode. Black (or Green) Friday is the day that many merchants switch from being in the red to in the black, the holiday season sees 20% of the year’s retail sales (more for some segments of the market the percentage is larger). As the season progresses the authorities opine as to what the sales reports tell us about the economic state of the nation while the news programs run the inevitable stories on the controversy over what the holidays should really be about, with the usual complaints that it is too commercial and should be returned to being about what it has never really been in the first place.
The retail capture of Xmas is just a part of capital’s project to consumerize the culture. The same Puritans who disdained the false birthday of the savior also put in place Blue Laws that severely limited retail sales on Sundays so that folks would instead spend the morning at church and the rest contemplating their relationship with their creator. By the 1950s retailers had had it with the limitations and began a long term campaign to get rid of the Blue Laws via a combination of legislation and court decisions. The latter were usually carried out by secularists arguing that retail restraints based on religious grounds violated separation of church and state big time, their mercantile allies tended to argue for economic liberty and customer choice. As a result in all but a few southern states time pressed Americans can do their holiday, err Christmas shopping the entire weekend. Check out your local Wal-Mart (owned by a conservative Christian family who puts is key priority elsewhere) parking lot on a December Sunday morning – lots of folks not at church and observing the Sabbath in honor of their Lord whose birthday they are shopping for. The effect is measurable, church membership has been dropping since the 1950s, an MIT study conservatively estimates that repeal of the Blue Laws suppressed church membership by ten million, and only a forth or less of Americans actually attend services on a given Sunday.
The theocon elite, having allied with the corporations, cannot directly complain much less actually do anything about the overwhelming assault on the Christmas tradition such as it was by their retail friends. This is all the more true since most conservatives are pro-wealth libertarians who joyously revel in personally partaking in the modern material side of the holidays. Diamonds Are Forever, and every Xmas season Lexus runs its Holidays– that’s Holiday, not Christmas -- Sales Event ad campaign in which lucky upper crusters delightfully receive their surprise shiny new hi end luxury machine adorned with a great big bow. And if those items are beyond your means there are the hi-tech toys at Best Buy. Who doesn’t want one of those new plasma TVs to watch American Idol and House on? We all do. Driving towards the New Jersey Turnpike after spending the holidays in New York last time around I saw a billboard featuring the line "Merry Christmas and a Happy New Rate" – well at least they used the term Christmas.
Being impotent and unwilling to really reform Christmas by taking on Big Money in a serious way, the theocon elite does what it does so well, it cynically mounts diversionary attacks designed to produce another handy wedge issue while hiding the true enemy of Christmas piety. Culture Warriors want you to believe that the secular-progressives drove the retailers to use Happy Holidays rather than Merry Christmas. Why would the merchants care what the libs think? They just want to be inclusive in their perpetual effort to expand the market base by bringing in the nonChristians and better boost their bottom line. It’s a demographic necessity. A century ago Christians made up almost the entire population, now they are down to three quarters and dropping. Meanwhile the nonreligious are the fastest growing cohort, having risen from a couple of percent to as much as a fifth of the population over the last half century, with assorted nonChristian faiths making up the other 5%. The merchants have little choice to accommodate the new social reality.
O’Reilly et al. tout getting the big chain stores to return to using Merry Christmas as though they had scored a major victory in the struggle against CNN and the ACLU. If the ACLU and its ilk disappeared and the courts allowed all the Christian holiday displays in government facilities believers could desire it would not reverse the damage corporate capital is doing to the theocon illusion of Christmas. And as the nonChristian portion of the population continues to rise the stores will continue the push to deemphasize the Christian aspect of the celebrations.
Here’s a good one. The FoxNews that culture warrior O’Reilly appears on is using a seasonal green background color that they label their Holiday theme. That’s Holiday, not Christmas.
But if progressives blame it all on the retailers then they too are making a big mistake. Merchants are in the end providing a popular service. They are not holding guns to people’s heads and forcing America to shop til they drop during the holidays. It is popular demand that above all else is secularizing the solstice holidays even as the public complains about what they themselves are doing. The great middle class majority has bought into the commercial Xmas big time. The folks who do not participate are largely the millions who would do so if they could afford it. Those who deliberately choose not to go material are a rather scarce lot. The Amish come to mind. So do Catholic priests and nuns. May be the Quakers. The majority can put a stop to the War on Christmas if they really want to. But there is no reason to think they will. Not only would making Christmas into a day of true religious devotion cost the economy a whole lot of money, most people pretty much like things the way they are even if they are not willing to admit it and prefer to complain about it. What would be nice would be if the right wingers would be honest about who is really behind the situation – their corporate allies with the cooperation of the great bulk of the population -- but there is no reason to think that is going to happen either. Whining and complaining about the situation they have contributed to is what they do best.
This year has seen exceptional concern over the retail aspect of the holidays as the economy gets scary in a way it has rarely if ever been since the 1930s. Wall Street Journal pundit Daniel Henniger complained that a "nation that can’t say ‘Merry Christmas’ is a nation capable of ruining its own economy." Now Daniel, did not -- according to your theocon thesis -- presecular, traditional value following, godly Americans regularly proclaim Merry Christmas back in say, the 1930s? Here in the 21st century there is talk of a new economic reality that will even after the recovery leave Americans less hypermaterialistic than they have been since Reagan promoted wealth and consumerism as the ACME of the American ideal. One can hope so. But don’t bet on it.