[A nicely done history. Plus the paragraph at the end is a funny bonus for O'Reilly/Fox fans]
The New York Times
December 4, 2005
Editorial Observer
This Season's War Cry: Commercialize Christmas, or Else
By ADAM COHEN
Religious conservatives have a cause this holiday season: the
commercialization of Christmas. They're for it.
The American Family Association is leading a boycott of Target for not
using the words "Merry Christmas" in its advertising. (Target denies
it has an anti-Merry-Christmas policy.) The Catholic League boycotted
Wal-Mart in part over the way its Web site treated searches for
"Christmas." Bill O'Reilly, the Fox anchor who last year started a
"Christmas Under Siege" campaign, has a chart on his Web site of
stores that use the phrase "Happy Holidays," along with a poll that
asks, "Will you shop at stores that do not say 'Merry Christmas'?"
This campaign - which is being hyped on Fox and conservative talk
radio - is an odd one. Christmas remains ubiquitous, and with its
celebrators in control of the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court
and every state supreme court and legislature, it hardly lacks for
powerful supporters. There is also something perverse, when Christians
are being jailed for discussing the Bible in Saudi Arabia and
slaughtered in Sudan, about spending so much energy on stores that
sell "holiday trees."
What is less obvious, though, is that Christmas's self-proclaimed
defenders are rewriting the holiday's history. They claim that the
"traditional" American Christmas is under attack by what John Gibson,
another Fox anchor, calls "professional atheists" and "Christian
haters." But America has a complicated history with Christmas, going
back to the Puritans, who despised it. What the boycotters are doing
is not defending America's Christmas traditions, but creating a new
version of the holiday that fits a political agenda.
The Puritans considered Christmas un-Christian, and hoped to keep it
out of America. They could not find Dec. 25 in the Bible, their sole
source of religious guidance, and insisted that the date derived from
Saturnalia, the Roman heathens' wintertime celebration. On their first
Dec. 25 in the New World, in 1620, the Puritans worked on building
projects and ostentatiously ignored the holiday. From 1659 to 1681
Massachusetts went further, making celebrating Christmas "by
forbearing of labor, feasting or in any other way" a crime.
The concern that Christmas distracted from religious piety continued
even after Puritanism waned. In 1827, an Episcopal bishop lamented
that the Devil had stolen Christmas "and converted it into a day of
worldly festivity, shooting and swearing." Throughout the 1800's, many
religious leaders were still trying to hold the line. As late as 1855,
New York newspapers reported that Presbyterian, Baptist and Methodist
churches were closed on Dec. 25 because "they do not accept the day as
a Holy One." On the eve of the Civil War, Christmas was recognized in
just 18 states.
Christmas gained popularity when it was transformed into a domestic
celebration, after the publication of Clement Clarke Moore's "Visit
from St. Nicholas" and Thomas Nast's Harper's Weekly drawings, which
created the image of a white-bearded Santa who gave gifts to children.
The new emphasis lessened religious leaders' worries that the holiday
would be given over to drinking and swearing, but it introduced
another concern: commercialism. By the 1920's, the retail industry had
adopted Christmas as its own, sponsoring annual ceremonies to kick off
the "Christmas shopping season."
Religious leaders objected strongly. The Christmas that emerged had an
inherent tension: merchants tried to make it about buying, while
clergymen tried to keep commerce out. A 1931 Times roundup of
Christmas sermons reported a common theme: "the suggestion that
Christmas could not survive if Christ were thrust into the background
by materialism." A 1953 Methodist sermon broadcast on NBC - typical of
countless such sermons - lamented that Christmas had become a
"profit-seeking period." This ethic found popular expression in "A
Charlie Brown Christmas." In the 1965 TV special, Charlie Brown
ignores Lucy's advice to "get the biggest aluminum tree you can find"
and her assertion that Christmas is "a big commercial racket," and
finds a more spiritual way to observe the day.
This year's Christmas "defenders" are not just tolerating
commercialization - they're insisting on it. They are also rewriting
Christmas history on another key point: non-Christians' objection to
having the holiday forced on them.
The campaign's leaders insist this is a new phenomenon - a "liberal
plot," in Mr. Gibson's words. But as early as 1906, the Committee on
Elementary Schools in New York City urged that Christmas hymns be
banned from the classroom, after a boycott by more than 20,000 Jewish
students. In 1946, the Rabbinical Assembly of America declared that
calling on Jewish children to sing Christmas carols was "an
infringement on their rights as Americans."
Other non-Christians have long expressed similar concerns. For
decades, companies have replaced "Christmas parties" with "holiday
parties," schools have adopted "winter breaks" instead of "Christmas
breaks," and TV stations and stores have used phrases like "Happy
Holidays" and "Season's Greetings" out of respect for the nation's
religious diversity.
The Christmas that Mr. O'Reilly and his allies are promoting - one
closely aligned with retailers, with a smack-down attitude toward
nonobservers - fits with their campaign to make America more like a
theocracy, with Christian displays on public property and Christian
prayer in public schools.
It does not, however, appear to be catching on with the public. That
may be because most Americans do not recognize this commercialized,
mean-spirited Christmas as their own. Of course, it's not even clear
the campaign's leaders really believe in it. Just a few days ago, Fox
News's online store was promoting its "Holiday Collection" for
shoppers. Among the items offered to put under a "holiday tree" was
"The O'Reilly Factor Holiday Ornament." After bloggers pointed this
out, Fox changed the "holidays" to "Christmases."
* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company