The (Seemingly) Eternal War on Christmas

Is it really "War on Christmas" again?  It seems to come earlier every year.  I am forced to ask because of Donald trump's recent comments* on the struggle for Christmas present, which is stoking the flames of the renewed "War on Christmas."

You know, Christmas, that time of year when we see Christmas trees everywhere, Santas in the malls and ever-deepening price cuts at retail stores?  The problem is apparently that the word "Christmas" is anathema to schools, in town squares, and to those same retailers.  Christmas pageants are now "winter" celebrations.  Christmas trees are now "holiday" trees.  The baby Jesus, the wise men, and the manger have been relegated to the Island of Misfit Holiday Symbols.

For Americans, though, this is nothing new.  We inherit a long history of subverting the celebration of Christmas.  Shaping the holiday to a particular end is nothing new.

Think about it.  Those most Christian of America's settlers, the Puritans, actually outlawed Christmas celebrations between 1659 and 1681.  Revelers caught celebrating the holiday were hit with a fine of 5 shillings.  In many places, December 25 was business as usual.

Of course there were Christmas services.  This was Puritan New England; there were always services.  It's simply that Christmas was viewed with extreme suspicion by religious and civic authorities.  As the historian Stephen Nissenbaum put it in his wonderful 1996 book, The Battle for Christmas, authorities in New England saw the holiday season as one of "rowdy public display, of excessive eating and drinking, the mockery of established authority, aggressive begging...and even the invasion of wealthy homes."

Not to mention the occasional public sex, apparently a real thing in England.

Yuletide was a time of upending the social order, which served as a sort of safety valve for the frustrations of those at the lower end of that order.  Wassailing, in terms of heavy drinking and drunken brawls and light vandalism, allowed the lower classes to let off steam and, presumably, helped keep them in line for the rest of the year.

The original war on Christmas, then, was a war against public rowdiness.  It changed course in the early nineteenth century when upper-class merchants, realizing Christmas wasn't going away, tried a new tactic.  Writers such as Washington Irving and Clement C. Moore (presumably) began reshaping the holiday by transforming the character of Saint Nicholas from an austere fourth-century bishop known for miracles and secret gift-giving into a jolly old elf with a belly laugh and a white beard.

He came to bring presents to the children and, implicitly, to deliver the message of a Christmas celebrated, quietly, with lots and lots of store-bought gifts, among the family in the confines of the home.

It's probably not a coincidence that this came about as industrialization was beginning to make consumer goods more readily available to more people.  Advertising, catalogs, and department stores would emerge in the decades to follow, and the now-familiar image of Santa Claus would be used to entice shoppers.  By the 1870s, it seems fair to say that Christmas had been transformed into an orgy, not of drinking and feasting, but of consumption.  The second American "War on Christmas" succeeded in changing Christmas for good.

So it goes.  Christmas is changed by each successive generation to serve the particular needs of that generation.  And the previous generation always rails against it.

In an America populated almost entirely by Christians, it was easy for all the terminology and symbolism used in the public square to be Christian. But the Christmas we celebrate outside of churches is not a Christian holiday; it is an American one.  As a quintessentially American holiday, it changes with the country.  To include the many non-Christians in this country, we have changed the way we speak of it, leading to the perhaps more anodyne terms used by government agencies and retailers.  Still the marketing of Christmas is so effective that this non-believer will be found wishing a "Merry Christmas" to all.

Retailers, who have been accused of caving into rampant secularism, know this.  No one is holding a gun to Target's collective head to force the company to strike the word Christmas from it's ads.  They do it because inclusiveness is profitable.  Nor is this effort part of some larger "War on Religion," an attempt to transform America into an atheistic nation.  Christmas has always been protean in nature, and this is how we adapt it to the present moment.

Perhaps this very flexibility in possible meanings is why the Puritans were so suspicious of the holiday in the first place.  Nothing in the Bible supports December 25 as the date of Jesus' birth, unlike, say, material supporting the date of Easter, a holiday which has historically been more important.  That date in December happens to coincide with other celebrations of the winter solstice and the longer days it brought.  Christmas itself was, then, in its own way an attempt to sell Christianity to the Roman people.

Today people worldwide, many not Christians, celebrate it American-style.  Some, though caught up in the consumer aspects of the holiday, almost certainly imbibe the religious message of peace on Earth and good will toward men.

Not a bad message, that.  As a vehicle for it, Christmas may be the greatest ad campaign in history.

*See comment below.