The Oberlin Review
<< Front page Commentary December 16, 2005

Status of War on Christmas

The Christmas season fast approaches, but gone are the joyous cries of children, the uplifting decorations, the tinsel and cheer. In their stead, a cool wind blows.

Now, one could easily attribute this to the fact that there are still a couple of weeks to go until Mr. Christ’s birthday, or the fact that finals time is rarely all that joyous. (The coldness thing is likely seasonal.) But Occam’s Triple-Bladed-Razor dictates that we search for the most interesting explanation, while at the same time taking care to use Occam’s aloe vera moistening strip to its full potential, whatever that entails.

And so we turn to Henry Ford (1863-1947), who was not only very good at making cars rapidly, but was also likely responsible for the earliest writings on the slow death of Christmas:

“Instead of looking forward to Christmas, it is a spirit of inquiry as to how far we can go at Christmas. We are asking whether we dare, as Christians in a Christian land, whisper the Name that gives Christmas its meaning.” “Last Christmas most people had a hard time finding Christmas cards that indicated in any way that Christmas commemorated Someone’s Birth... Now, all this begins with the designers of the cards.”

“And so when they said, ‘Reading the Bible is sheer proselytizing; it isn’t fair,’ the non-Jew, who wanted to prove that he is fair and unprejudiced above all things else (a weakness the Jews know how to manipulate), said, ‘Well, then, out goes the Bible!’ And it went out. Very well! What next? ‘You must abolish Christmas, too.’”

Now, some saw Ford’s theories, published in The International Jew, to be a bit anti-Semitic (his habit of donating to Hitler could have tipped them off); thankfully, modern-day theories of a “War on Christmas” have toned down a bit.

“The wagers of this war on Christmas are a cabal of secularists, so-called humanists, trial lawyers, cultural relativists and liberal, guilt-wracked Christians — not just Jewish people,” offers Fox News’s John Gibson in his masterpiece of titling The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought (TWOCHLPBSCHWTYT, for short).

Bah- PC thought police propaganda, says LA columnist and movie critic Burt Prelutsky, writing for TownHall.com, where you can read the latest from Cal Thomas, George Will and famous White House bribe recipients such as Armstrong Williams all at once:

“I blame my fellow Jews. When it comes to pushing the multicultural, anti-Christian agenda, you find Jewish judges, Jewish journalists and the ACLU at the forefront.”

Bill O’Reilly, always the voice of reason, argues for a sort of third way: While “secular progressives” are primarily responsible for the end of Christmas as we know it, Jews who complain of Christmastime conversion attempts “gotta go to Israel then” (presumably taking their “seven” candles of Chanukah with them). But there’s no need to worry about these Grinches, Hebrew-speaking or otherwise:

“I’m gonna use all the power that I have on radio and television to bring horror into the world of people who are trying to do that,” said the Fox News host, defending “the Judeo-Christian tradition.”

As a side note, you may wonder, given the high America-hater-to-Republican ratio within Jewry, just where “Judeo” enters O’Reilly’s values. But if you read the sexual harassment suit filed against him last year, you will see the special role that the falafel, a historically Semitic food, allegedly plays in his life:

“You’d have to do it really light, just kind of a tease business,” the news anchor is said to have reasoned aloud to a female employee. Falafels are crumbly.

But falafels aside, what exactly is this “War on Christmas?”

The classic example is Macy’s decision last year to abandon “Merry Christmas” on its signs for the all-inclusive phrase “Happy Holidays.” Macy’s and related chains, of course, have long courted the Jewish community, purchasing “Happy High Holidays” ads in the Times and sponsoring Jewish nonprofit organizations. Choosing not to alienate them by implying that they celebrate a holiday that the stores don’t would seem to be a logical step for a profit-making organization to take, and also one that the self-styled capitalism fans who make up the bulk of the “pro-Christmas” faction would readily understand.

Sure, there are a few atheists and non-Christians who rival O’Reilly and friends in self-righteousness and equivocate Christmas trees to full-scale bloody Jesus replicas. Scattered school boards have banned Christmas carols and some companies have been overly vigilant in culling the word “Christmas” from materials and employee speech.

These same examples, however, were available to Ford nearly a century ago, albeit with different school board and company names. Yet Christmas somehow persists, and so flourishes in the public, commercial sphere that religious leaders regularly caution against rampant materialism.

Indeed, the pope, his thinking presumably being that the problem is not so much a lack of Jesus’ image in stores so much as the presence of it in neon and plastic, last night warned, “In today’s consumer society, this time of the year unfortunately suffers from a sort of commercial pollution that threatens to alter its real spirit.”

As a Jew, I’m not too sure what the “real spirit” in question is, but I don’t think it involves falafel-wielding madmen threatening to “bring horror into the world.”
 
 

   

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