Christmas in America is a season of time-honored traditions — the sacred performance of the annual ACLU lawsuit over the presence of an insufficiently secular “holiday” tree; the ritual provocations of the atheist displays licensed by pitifully appeasing municipalities to sit between the menorah and the giant Frosty the Snowman; the familiar strains of every hack columnist’s “war on Christmas” column rolling off the keyboard as easily as Richard Clayderman playing “Winter Wonderland” . . .
This year has been a choice year. A crucified skeleton Santa Claus was erected as part of the “holiday” display outside the Loudoun County courthouse in Virginia — because, let’s face it, nothing cheers the hearts of moppets in the Old Dominion like telling them, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus — and he’s hanging lifeless in the town square.” Alas, a week ago, some local burghers failed to get into the ecumenical spirit and decapitated him. Who are these killjoys? Christians intolerant of the First Amendment (as some have suggested)? Or perhaps a passing Saudi? Our friends in Riyadh only the other day beheaded Amina bin Salem (so to speak) Nasser for “sorcery,” and it would surely be grossly discriminatory not to have some Wahhabist holiday traditions on display in Loudoun County. (The Islamic Saudi Academy, after all, is one of the most prestigious educational institutions of neighboring Fairfax County.) Across the fruitcaked plain in California, the city of Santa Monica allocated permits for “holiday” displays at Palisades Park by means of lottery. Eighteen of the 21 slots went to atheists — for example, the slogan “37 million Americans know a myth when they see one” over portraits of Jesus, Santa, and Satan.
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I don’t believe I’ve mentioned the city of Santa Monica in this space since my Christmas offering of 1998, when President Clinton was in the midst of difficulties arising from his mentoring of a certain intern. My column that year began:
“Operator, I’d like to call Santa Monica.”
“Why? Just ’cause he’s a little overweight?”
Crickets chirping? Ah, how soon they forget. Perhaps Santa Monica should adopt a less theocratic moniker and change its name to Satan Monica, as its interpretation of the separation of church and state seems to have evolved into expressions of public contempt for large numbers of the citizenry augmented by the traumatizing of their children. Boy, I can’t wait to see what those courageous atheists come up with for Ramadan. Or does that set their hearts aflutter quite as much?
One sympathizes, up to a point. As America degenerates from a land of laws to a land of legalisms, much of life is devoted to forestalling litigation. What’s less understandable is the faintheartedness of explicitly Christian institutions. Last year I chanced to see the e-mail exchanges between college administrators over the choice of that season’s Christmas card. I will spare their blushes, and identify the academy only as a Catholic college in New England. The thread began by asking the distribution list for “thoughts” on the proposed design. No baby, no manger, no star over Bethlehem, but a line drawing of a dove with a sprig of olive in its beak. Underneath the image was the following:
What is Christmas?
It is tenderness for the past, courage for the present, hope for the future.
It is a fervent wish that every cup may overflow with blessings rich and eternal,
and that every path may lead to peace.
Agnes M. Pharo
I celebrate Christmas, say "Merry Christmas" to people, give and accept gifts, generally love the holiday, and I have no problem whatsoever with what a small town in Texas wants to do for Christmas.
Hell, I wouldn't mind a nativity scene on city land where I live, either. I doesn't affect me, and is, in my opinion, a celebration of our culture as Americans as much as it is a celebration of Christ.
We've become too stupid to survive. What's obvious, is, we're willingly tearing down Westernization and Christianity in order to conform to leftist and Islamic ideals. What a strange strange trip this has been.
Conservatives need to learn to fight in the Christmas wars, the cultural wars and the political wars or we won't have a voice left in any of them. We're already losing the will to fight politically as we bash each other instead of our opposites. That doesn't make me feel good about winning either of the other wars. They are all connected. Conservatives can't afford to conserve their fighting words in any of the arenas.
American Catholics and other Christians are absolute cowards. We need the Spirit to enliven some of these people.
They're still trying to parlay with an army that is knocking our battlements down and sacking our cities at an unbelievable pace.
I'll be moving to Africa or Asia, where practicing Catholics live. (Prepared to fight the next time modernity at arms tries to rid itself of the Christian tradition and replace it with something newer and "better".)
Happy Holidays? The primary definition of "holiday" is "holy day." Duh. "Holy" means "set apart to the service of God or a god." So he who cleverly thinks that "Happy Holidays" has been sufficiently scrubbed of God and religion will need to think again. Before your head explodes, may I suggest "Merry Christmas?"
Every year now for over a decade, Fox News and rightwing talking heads tell us of the horrific "War on Christmas"....get a lot of their fans convinced that "any day now, those godless liberals are going to ban Christmas"....hysteria abounds...
and every 25th of December "somehow" Christmas comes anyway and survives. 11 months later, day after Thanksgiving, it starts all over again.
At some point, with Christmas "miraculosly" able to survive the "nation-wide assault by the atheists".....you'd think these folks would figure out...
it's a conjob. For ratings and political "energizing"
Hey Mark. You forgot to mention Canada's own David Suzuki. His foundation is running ads that claim that Santa's home at the North Pole is melting and the jolly old fellow is going to be homeless and his reindeer will drown unless we send St. Suzuki some money to help save the icecap. Traumatized children everywhere are weeping and collecting pennies and sending them to Suzuki's "foundation". The ads show DS, in a Santa suit, photoshopped in front of melting icebergs and open water. Meanwhile there's ten feet of ice and it's -40 at the N Pole. Don't let reality intrude on destroying our fun and freaking out our kids. Replacing old myths with new ones is the where the real action is, obviously.
Maybe it's just me, but if all you can point to is an email exchange between professors in New England and a skeleton Santa in California then Christmas is doing just fine in America. Those of us who don't live in California or New England can still experience Christmas celebrations in the metaphorical (and often literal) town square. We can go home at night and watch ABC broadcast Charlie Brown Christmas two weeks in a row with its reading of Luke. We may not be able to avoid every business, local and multinational, exploiting Christmas to sell us items, and we may go overboard with lights and decorations on our homes, but one thing we are definitely NOT doing is keeping Christmas out of our public dialogue or out of our thoughts. We may say Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas, but only because we are about to go on vacation and may not see the other person until the new year.
You see, in most of America we know that we are saturated with Christmas-related songs, images, words, colors, etc. for most of December. Some of them are genuine while many of them are commercialized. But what they all have in common is that the only way any of them matters is if we know the true meaning of Christmas in our personal hearts and in our homes. And that the best thing we can do during Christmas is to give unto others, showing Christ to the world around us. And again, I can't speak for California or New England, but I see that spirit of giving burning bright where I live and in the towns and cities I travel to.
Christmas is not dead Mr. Steyn.
After attending our sons school "Christmas Concert" the thought occured to me.
Of course it wasn't a Christmas concert, it was a "Winter Celebration" or something along those lines. It featured mostly traditional Canadian folk songs but did have a few that refered to winter such as Winter Wonderland".
It was a nice concert and the kids did a great job but I started thinking that with all of the other Christmas preperations that were going on was it even neccessary to hold this concert now? Any Friday would have been fine and perhaps closer to Canada Day would have been appropriate.I get it that we don't have "Christmas Concerts" any more and can accept that, but then why bother to have a substitute, that signifies nothing, right at Christmas?
For those of us who celebrate, Christmas can be a busy enough time without the schools adding an event, that goes out of its way to say that it is, about anything BUT Christmas.
Stay cheerful, and when the checkout clerks at the stores hit you with a lame sounding "Have a good holiday", hit them back with a resounding "Merry Christmas!" It's great fun.
What I do, is that I continue to wish the folks I meet "Merry Christmas," NOT "Happy holidays."
Not once has any of them told me they found that offensive or even problematic.
The ACLU doesn't even speak for many atheists here. Just that small fraction of disgruntled atheists who are trying to copy the militancy of the Black Panthers and the radical feminists.
Civil disobedience. We are the majority. We should act like it. Whereever a judge orders a Christian symbol removed, someone should replace it the next day under the cover of night.
Your post is a beautiful example of why the U.S. is a liberal democracy, not simply a democracy, and why the Constitution contains so many strong protections against the tyranny of the majority.
There are signs--in Malakoff, Texas and Fort Travis, for instance--that Americans are finally waking to the assault on traditional American culture. Perhaps, just perhaps, the hateful zealotry of the athiests will spark the recrudescence of the culture upon which the US was built.
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