War on Christmas? - By Kaatryn MacMorgan
The War on Christmas?
Conservative leader Jerry Falwell is steaming mad about the war on Christmas, fuming at the top of his lungs to all who will hear him about how the various and sundry liberals are taking away the Christian people’s deity-given right to call a Christmas tree a Christmas tree and a Christmas break a Christmas break. He calls it a downright war and is rallying his troops. This ranting isn’t ringing quite true to me, and I don’t think it has much to do with my being a liberal. It has more to do with me having a perfectly good memory.
The war on Christmas that I, as a liberal, am supposedly engaging in, basically has two parts, calling the Christmas holiday “the holidays” and calling Christmas trees “Holiday trees.” While I find the holiday trees thing silly, I’d like to address why this liberal calls the holidays the holidays…
Like many non-Catholics, I went to Catholic School for a while. My school prided itself on having the best academic calendar there was, with very little time off. This was, in fact, why my then-newly single mother chose it, because it was a lot cheaper to have me in school than to pay a sitter for when I wasn’t in school. Our financial situation at holiday time was made a little harder one year when the school decided that we were no longer going to have a Christmas break of three days and a New Year’s Day break of one, but a week and a half long holiday break covering both Christmas and New Years, like the secular schools did.
Out of nun-like attention to proper grammar, the school did not call this break “Christmas and New Year break” or even “Winter break,” but “holiday break.” I can assure you, and I expect the Vatican will back me up on this, that this school did not have a war on Christmas, but instead was practicing a Roman-like efficacy on the cheap paper calendar. No “winter interim break consisting of Christmas, New Years Day and the spaces in-between where your children are obnoxious with greed and high on sugar” but instead the elegant “holiday break.”
I am certain Kwanzaa, Diwali and Hanukkah did not enter into the minds of these nuns when they were whirling the drum of the ditto machine, turning out the pale blue copies to send home to my mom, who grumbled and called the sitter when I thrust it into her hands. The holidays for these Christ-loving Christmas practicing front line assaulters on Christmas consisted of two dates- Christmas and New Years. Thus it became holidays, not to get rid of Christ, but to save ink.
It was the seventies, and saving money was in fashion, and it was around the same time that the employers in my area, and I assume all across the country, started ditching the traditional Thanksgiving party, Christmas party and New Year’s party and started doing a sort of new wave syncretic thing in early December, a sort of one-size fits all party to celebrate all three which they called a “holiday party.” Now, as a liberal, I’m willing to believe a lot about the nasty corporations out there, but I don’t think that killing Christmas was the idea, here. I think it was saving money. In fact, it was a wonderful thing for my poor family, because the holiday bonus would be given out at the party, with time to spend it before Christmas.
I watched the trend to consolidate the holidays continue as I grew up. My choir stopped having Christmas and Thanksgiving and Halloween concerts, and instead got a big “holiday” concert at the end of the year which included plenty of songs about Jesus, something about a sleigh ride and a song I distinctly remember as ending in “and a Happy New Year” and therefore not rightly being called a Christmas carol. Indeed, what was and was not Christmas was a very big deal to these nuns, and a bunch of other Christians I met with.
In the eighties, the moral majority and their friends made it clear that they were disgusted with the sleigh bells, Santas, reindeer and trees, because these were NOT “of Christ.” Indeed, today you can simply google the words “Christmas Tree” and “Anti-Christ” and find sites like Bibletruths, Raptureready, Demonbuster and much more that are more than willing to explain to you how the Christmas tree, that thing that Falwell thinks people are calling a holiday tree out of hatred of Christians, is not of Christ, and is, in fact, a Pagan symbol that should probably not be affiliated with their messiah’s holy name. In honesty, when I met my first “holiday tree,” I thought it was these concerned Christians that we were trying to appease, not liberals like myself. My own tree gets called “the tree” more than Christmas Tree, although its gone through a slew of names, because I sort of agree with these righteous Christians- it’s not about Christ, so his name shouldn’t get slapped on it.
I think public righteousness is just the new flavor this year. People see things, and get righteous without every stopping to wonder why. I mean, you and I might know that the abbreviation X for Christ comes from the letter Chi and an attempt by priests to be respectful, and you and I might suspect that a Christmas Tree is called a holiday tree to explain why its kept up through January (mine goes to the mulcher on the 26th) even though Christmas is over. You and I might know a lot of things… but other people don’t, and it’s easier to suspect the unseen creeping enemy than to realize things happen just because people are trying to be more efficient or are being lazy or anything boring like that.
I am a liberal. I would love it if the term “the holidays” was being bandied about to be more inclusive, but inclusiveness is not the way the world works these days- this “holidays” thing is about greed, efficiency and often, accuracy. It is naïve to think we liberals have had anything to do with this. We can’t keep George W. Bush from being reelected and Falwell thinks we have the power to take on Christmas?
As a registered member of the liberal party of the great blue state of New York, and a pagan, and a woman married (not civilly unioned) to a woman, who is also pro-choice, and an academic, I can assure you that if liberals were having a war on Christmas, I would have gotten the memo by now. We have lots of wars we’re involved in, like the war on ignorance, for example, and the war on poverty, and the war on AIDS… we’re just too busy with those wars to bother with something like Christmas, especially when most of us celebrate it quite happily.
Kaatryn MacMorgan is a liberal author and researcher with degrees in Biology, Psychology and Anthropology and describes herself as a chronic observer of the human condition. Until recently, she was the acting head of CUEW, but stepped down to dedicate her life to cancer research. She lives with her wife and son in Buffalo, NY.