The American Christmas Wins the War: A Holiday Happy Ending

It began in earnest several weeks ago, launched by politically and doctrinally extreme Christian fundamentalists, with their designated media loudmouth Bill O’Reilly providing the show-biz fulmination, basically to promote a book by John Gibson, a Fox News producer, called The War on Christmas.

Its other political and economic dimensions were expressed by Agape Press, with their slogan “Reliable News From a Christian Source,” and a logo above which modestly floats a halo.

What most people heard about it was the sudden anger over store clerks saying “Happy holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” But what it was supposed to be was far more audacious.

In his Agape essay, preacher Ralph Baker announces: “Attention Christians! Christmas is definitely ours.” He attacks retailers and others who have joined “in efforts to steal the true meaning of the Christmas season and replace it with a secularized, paganized, non-religious holiday.” The word “neutered” also appears in conjunction with “secularized.”

He continues: “There is an alliance building right now among major Christian ministries -- such as the American Family Association (AFA) -- to identify and target those companies who want our money but not our Christ. .. This is not just another economic boycott effort. It is a witness to the world that Christmas is important to the world because Christ is important to the world. This is exactly why the world has paused for 2,000 years and acknowledged the baby in a manger. That little baby has meant billions of dollars to retailers. It is time that they acknowledge Him.”

So the idea was economic intimidation, which is certainly the vulnerability that business presents, as anxious as they are about anything affecting retail in the very serious season where they make upwards of half their sales for the year.

There is another economic factor that bleeds over into politics. Baker begins his essay by pointing out that polls show George Bush won in 2004 because people were upset by homosexual marriage. This therefore is supposed to be another such issue. It has the special advantage of being a new one, which means political fundamentalist groups can raise lots of money by scaring people with it.

For even true believers get a little soft on the old issues that don’t raise fears so dependably, out of sheer boredom and weariness. The political preachers need something new and alarming to scare people with, so the gullible will send them brand new scads of hard-earned money reflexively, compulsively. It’s the political religious right’s version of impulse shopping---with the impulse being to get the buzz of righteousness, and quell the fear and distaste for the power of the evil ones.

Stuck somewhere in this mess is the perennial charge that the true meaning of Christmas is being lost. Usually the culprit is the profit motive, but Gibson and others added regulation and political correctness. They have lots of Swift-Boating examples, many of which have been debunked, though finding overbearing acts of misinterpretation by clueless bureaucracies is not that difficult.

As Christmas approaches, the noise is abating as this attempt has deflated. Yet these groups have found a real danger, and a real war on the American Christmas---in the mirror. They have met the enemy, and it is them.

The most alarming core of fanaticism is the same as at the core of the attempt to change the science curriculum in the Dover PA schools. The recent ruling by Judge Jones reproduces statements of the fanatical fundamentalists on the school board, as summarized by georgia10 at Daily Kos (with page numbers from the Judge's decision):

1. The board members wanted a 50-50 ratio between the teaching of creationism and evolution in biology classes (p. 95)

2. The President also wanted to inject religion into social studies classes, and supplied the school with a book about the myth of the separation of church and state. (p. 96)

3. Another board member said "This country wasn't founded on Muslim beliefs or evolution. This country was founded on Christianity and our students should be taught as such." (p. 102)

4. At a meeting, a board member's wife gave a speech, saying that "evolution teaches nothing but lies," quoted from Genesis, asked "how can we allow anything else to be taught in our schools," recited gospel verses telling people to become born again Christians, and stated that evolution violated the teachings of the Bible. (p. 103)

5. Other statements by board members included "Nowhere in the Constitution does it call for a separation of church and state," and "liberals in black robes" are "taking away the rights of Christians, " and "2,000 years ago someone died on a cross. Can't someone take a stand for him?"

Notice how similar even the language is to the Agape essay.

The fanatical anger over Christmas being stolen from Christians is in a factual sense nutty as a holiday fruitcake. First of all, nobody is trying to take away a single Christian religious celebration, anywhere in America. Nobody is going into anybody’s churches and saying they can’t celebrate the birth of Christ.

Plus the idea of the “Christmas holiday season” being stolen from Christianity is historically ludicrous. Of all the elements of the traditional American Christmas, about 95% of them have nothing whatever to do with Christianity. Many predate Christianity by centuries, going back to indigenous celebrations of the winter solstice, the celebrations of fire and light in the winter darkness, the post-harvest feast, the mysteries of death (winter, darkness) and resurrection (spring, light) that is as least as old as the very ancient recognition of the bear as a sacred animal that "died" in the winter and was "reborn" in the spring.

Many indigenous cultures see the winter as a time of the earth’s pregnancy, and so birth and children are part of it. Though gift-giving probably has its roots in Greek festivals at the New Year, the Roman Saturnalia, the Feast of Fools and Misrule, the Christian emphasis on the Christ child probably had something to do with gifts to children becoming the focus. The whole “naughty and nice” aspect also predates Christianity, as does the Yuletide, the so-called Christmas tree, holly, etc.

Other “traditions,” developed independent of Christianity and well after it began. The modern “Santa Claus” is mostly a combination of various mythic and folk figures (both gift-giving and punishing ones), given his contemporary form by Coca Cola and other businesses.

So nearly all “Christmas” traditions are “heathen”, Pagan and secular in origin. The early Church readily admitted that it used the Roman mid-winter festivals to celebrate a birth that more likely took place in the spring or summer.

But what’s truly serious about this is the attempt to assert exclusive power over the American Christmas, as it has evolved (there’s that word again!) along with the country.

Christmas became powerful in America, partly because it was so commercialized, and like a lot of popular culture, it became a nexus for the exchange of cultural traditions. I grew up in a working class area of mostly Catholics from Italy, eastern Europe and Ireland, but with a strong presence in our bigger towns and cities of German and Scottish Protestants and European Jews. In my family, we had specifically Italian traditions and Christmas foods from my mother’s side, and eastern European from my father’s.

But there was tolerance and more—there was sharing. That was the spirit of—the meaning of—Christmas, as America practiced it. The songs we sang give it away---they came from many countries, many times, both religious and secular.

Out of this amalgamation came regional traditions. In western Pennsylvania to this day, for instance, homes are more intensely decorated with more elaborate lights and displays than where I live now in rural far northern California.

These of course were mostly Christians in a mostly (and very openly) Christian area. That kind of Christmas influenced many Jewish celebrations of Hanukkah, with more emphasis on gift-giving than before.

Now we have Kwanzaa, a new celebration for the African American community, with roots in Africa but also in this “spirit of Christmas” at its best.

And of course, there are holidays and holy days for virtually all religions that occur in mid-winter, rooted in one of the oldest human celebrations and religious occasions, the Solstice.

So the American Christmas has expanded to include all of these, in sharing and community. The earth-based religions are particularly appropriate because there are no more powerful earth-based religions than those of the original Americans, the Native peoples.

These are appropriate in another way. Most Native people will tell you that they don’t always get along. But there is one element that I’ve found essentially universal among Native traditionals—and that’s respect for religion, anyone’s religion (as long as it isnt harmful or imposed.)

The American Christmas follows the example of Native peoples who accepted Christianity along with their own religions. They may have left some parts out that they learned from white Christians (like intolerance and hypocrisy) but they included what spoke to them. They accept reverence and joy, and ways of understanding their relationship to life and the earth.

Without a direct or conscious intent perhaps, this attitude informs religious freedom in the Constitution, and has since become the most characteristic feature of the American Christmas.

It’s also true that this is no longer the America of the first half of the twentieth century. There are many more cultures represented from many more parts of the world---from all of vast Asia, from Latin America and more.

And there are Muslims in America now, and thanks to a certain ignorance and intolerance fed by reaction and over-reaction to a terrorist attack, there is fear and a defensiveness, a feeling that to fight so-called Islamic fundamentalism, we need to circle the wagons of Christian fundamentalism. Yet Christ is a respected figure in Muslim belief, and some Muslims in America celebrate Christmas.

Perhaps it was more comfortable for Christians to bring their religious beliefs into places where in a more diverse society it’s simply not appropriate. And it never was all that Constitutional. But diversity gives us the compensation of much more to be shared.

“Happy Holidays” is just an inclusive alternative, a greeting that is simply being polite, though usually unnecessarily so, since the American Christmas includes everyone.

So the real war is the attempted war on the American Christmas by those who want to have it all to themselves, or to lord it over others, or simply to exploit believers for their own power and wealth. Using political and economic power to try to reestablish a hegemony from the past is just plain un-American.

All religions are entitled to their holy days and their sacred places. But it seems to me, admittedly only partially qualified to observe that hoarding the Christmas holidays, the public Christmas, for Christians only, is fundamentally un-Christian, as well as un-American.

Let’s name the danger: the legitimizing of intolerance, the destruction of the American Christmas: part celebration of Christ’s birth, part celebration of the silent growing within the earth of the new life of spring, part Hannukah, part Kwanzza, leading up to the various New Year’s—European, Russian Orthodox, Chinese, Hindu, etc.

Most of these, you notice, are religious celebrations. But even if Mr. Scrooge’s newly discovered spirit of Christmas is secular, or even if celebration of family and friends, memory and hope at year’s end is defined as agnostic, it’s all the American Christmas, the best intent of the holiday season. (The worst is of course that it can never fulfill the inflated expectations, and all the projections, tensions, loneliness and pain come rushing out.)

Some of us will stick with one tradition and the expressions of one faith. But some of us will not only mix “secular” celebrations with religious, but we will attend high Mass and Hanukkah, sing a Native ceremonial song or a Buddhist chant at solstice. I don’t know if whites are invited to Kwanzaa events, but I was invited to a black fundamentalist church one Christmas, and had a great time.

In fact this is the one time of the year that America can feel like the America we’d like it to be: not just tolerant but open, compassionate, interested in learning about each other, and in sharing for our mutual joy, and our strength as a nation.

Some Christians want to assert that Christmas is only about Christ, and is only for Christians. In their churches it can be true. But it simply isn’t the case otherwise. In America the season called Christmas belongs to everyone.