War on Christmas



It was the Yuletide, that men call Christmas though they know in their hearts it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind.

The so-called "War on Christmas" (or less sensationally, the Christmas controversy) is a right-wing demagogic neologism referring to real or imagined secularist attempts to keep the annual December solstice holiday shopping season culturally inclusive. Setting the standard by which all other manufactroversies may be judged, it is most famously hawked each and every year by none other than former Fox News Channel contributor Bill O'Reilly.

Origins
Few people, even among those who promote this idea, know that its modern-day form started out as a conspiracy theory promulgated by groups affiliated with the John Birch Society, which termed it the "Assault on Christmas". In 1959, they released a pamphlet called "There Goes Christmas", in which they claimed that there was a new communist plot to "take the Christ out of Christmas" by replacing Christmas decorations with jewish United Nations iconography. The Society claimed that this formed part of a larger push to stamp out religion altogether and to cede American sovereignty to the UN. They urged members to boycott any stores with " decorations".

The JBS itself had developed the idea of a War on Christmas from inter-war antisemitic publications, particularly from Henry Ford's The International Jew. Detecting a part of a supposed move to take over the world, the JBS claimed that Jews were launching a "war on Christianity", with one paper lamenting, "Last Christmas most people had a hard time finding Christmas cards that indicated in any way that Christmas commemorated Someone's Birth." This was (of course) seen as a plot by Jewish conspirators who "consider any public expression of Christian character as being derogatory to [their] religion." Sound familiar?

"They ain't makin' Jews like Jesus anymore…"


Ironically enough, Jews wrote or co-wrote quite a few of the most popular Christmas songs of the 20th century. For instance:


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 * music by (lyrics by the gentile Dr. Seuss)

Then again, since these tunes focus on the nonreligious aspects of Christmas, those so inclined will eagerly put such authorships forward as "evidence" of a fiendish Jewish plot to secularize the holiday. Oh, heck! Let's all just sing Christmas songs around the

More recently
The "War on Christmas" meme was revived in the 1990s by paleoconservative, VDARE founder, white nationalist, antisemite, and all-around wingnut Peter Brimelow, as part of a larger battle against multiculturalism. However, no individual is more responsible for dragging the concept from the right-wing fringe into "mainstream" media culture, and making it into an annual tradition as reliable and inevitable as the holiday season itself, than Bill O'Reilly, who is apparently horrified (yes, horrified!) that Wal-Mart greeters and other retail workers might wish that their customers enjoy "Happy Holidays" rather than "Merry Christmas", despite the fact that his own website sold "holiday ornaments" rather than X-Mas ornaments. Did anyone mention hypocrisy?

The fact that "Happy Holidays" refers to over a dozen holidays (see below) never seems to have any real effect on the demagoguery. Neither does the idea that Christmas itself was first made by blatantly ripping off a pagan holiday (let's hear it for the War on Yule!) or that puritanical types have made a few wars against Christmas themselves (see below). So the Religious Right keeps yammering about it and secularists keep making jokes about going along with it. As the years go by, the semi-ironic "Merry Christmas" greeting is gaining ground, used by some as a kind of meta-statement on the ongoing controversy. (It should be acknowledged that there are, in fact, some non-Christians who do object to the public usage of "Merry Christmas" — and in some cases even "Happy Holidays" — as expressions of Christian cultural hegemony in the West. However, and whether one agrees with their stance or not, such people aren't remotely close in either number or influence to becoming the Christmas-destroying juggernaut of right-wingers' fevered imaginations anytime soon.)

Interestingly enough, and in apparent defiance of the best efforts of the sinister anti-Christmas warriors, the proportion of American Christians who feel a religious meaning in Christmas is increasing, even as church membership is generally declining in the U.S. as well. This would appear to suggest that the unstated premise that the meaning of Christmas rests upon people using the word to sell merchandise is not correct.

In 2016, then-President-elect Donald Trump unilaterally declared an end to the War on Christmas, basically by declaring war on everyone who didn't say "Merry Christmas", although oddly enough Trump himself had previously waged war on Christmas when his management company banned Christmas trees from the lobby of one of his apartment houses in 1981.

Not like it used to be?


Many right-wingers misrepresent the history of Christian celebrations in an attempt to claim that Christmas in the past was all about religion, but now is purely secular with no mention of Jesus; for example, in 2017, there were claims that Australian schools were "trying to take pictures of Jesus out of Christmas cards". In addition to being completely made up, this ignores the fact that the very first Christmas card ever made had no mention of Christ, the nativity, God, angels or anything religious. Designed by John Callcott Horsley in 1843, it featured a scene of people drinking wine, including a mother feeding it to her young child, with generic scenes of charity at either side. Most of Christmas tradition was invented in the 19th century by people such as Charles Dickens, whose novella A Christmas Carol focuses on Christmas as a time for charity and spending time with loved ones rather than emphasizing the Christmas message. Largely secular Victorian traditions like roast dinners (also popularized in A Christmas Carol), trees, and cards show the lack of religious significance.

So what's a war without war profiteers?


The American Family Association (AFA) issues a yearly list of nationwide retail outlets often owned by huge multinational corporations that they say are "for," "marginal on," or "against" Christmas. The "for Christmas" companies supposedly use the word "Christmas" instead of "Xmas" or "Holiday" in their advertising, while the "against Christmas" companies do not. Of course, the AFA doesn't seem to notice that many of the companies on the "for Christmas" list often substitute "Holiday" for "Christmas" in their ads or minimize the number of references to the holidays altogether. This has led to speculation from godless, gay, pinko-commies that maybe the AFA receives compensation for inclusion on the "for Christmas" list, a claim that the AFA denies.

They've messed up our economy!
In 2008, the ante was raised as a columnist blamed the year's economic crisis on the War on Christmas. In true Wall Street Journal op-ed style, Daniel Henninger said that the push against Christmas is leading us to a Mad Max type environment.

The War in politics


In 2007, even some Presidential candidates took up the war, with Mike Huckabee claiming he was going to wish the gathered Iowa Republicans a "Merry Christmas" in spite of it possibly being "controversial". This was intensified in 2015 and 2016 under Donald Trump. Trump's wife, First Lady Melania Trump, officially declared the war over in 2018, when she told her then-friend on the phone:

Who gives a fuck about the Christmas stuff and decorations? I say that I'm working on Christmas and planning for the Christmas and they said, 'Oh, what about the children that they were separated?' Give me a fucking break.

"Happy Holidays" may also refer to…


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Weapons used in the war
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Actual wars on Christmas


In a twist that breaks an irony meter or two, in many of the times that a war has actually been declared on Christmas, it was Christians who were the ones warring against it.


 * In England, the Puritan government of Oliver Cromwell banned Christmas celebrations. This led to pro-Christmas rioting in several cities, in which rioters defied Cromwell by decking the halls with boughs of holly.
 * Scotland with its strong Calvinist tradition also ignored or minimised Christmas. Although it was popular before the 1560 Protestant Reformation, the celebration was banned by law in 1640 (e.g. fishermen in Aberdeen were forced to set out on their boats on Christmas Day). This was partly repealed in 1686, and then the ban introduced again in 1690 (when the Protestant King William came to the throne) until 1712. New Year (which has no religious significance) was the big winter holiday, while the Church of Scotland didn't consider Christmas to be important, and Christmas wasn't even a day off work until 1958. This position is still maintained the small ultra-Calvinist Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland.
 * In Massachusetts, Christmas was completely banned for 22 years, from 1659 until 1681, only being legalized again when King James II appointed an Anglican governor to the colony who could rule by decree. Christmas did not become popular there until the 1850s.
 * George Washington's famous crossing of the Delaware took place on the night of December 25, 1776, with the hope of catching the Hessian soldiers garrisoned in Trenton, New Jersey off guard in the morning as they were still in bed nursing hangovers. The Continental forces presumably weren't celebrating Christmas as they were busy loading boats. After the Revolutionary War, celebrating Christmas fell out of style in America as "too British".
 * Observation of Christmas in the British Isles was in decline during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Christmas had fallen under a cloud of official public disfavor as a result of the Industrial Revolution, along with most other festivals that had the potential to encourage public gatherings of the lower classes for alcohol-fueled revelry. The factory owning classes found this threatening. It took Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol to revive the holiday, which, as the story suggests, was being increasingly neglected by the capitalist class. And it did so by promoting a new style of family-centered observance as opposed to mass public gatherings.
 * Even today, certain fundamentalist Christians regard Christmas (not entirely inaccurately) as an unbiblical holiday of pagan (and/or papist) origin. The Jehovah's Witnesses and Herbert W. Armstrong are well-known for this. For similar reasons, Jack Chick states that Christians are not supposed to celebrate Christ's birth in at least one of his comic book tracts, and argues that teaching children about Santa Claus will lead to them rejecting Christ once they realize Santa is a fairy tale. Other fundamentalist types, such as the Independent Baptists and Pentecostals, tend to de-emphasize the celebration of Christmas relative to mainline churches even when they don't reject it outright. Some Christian fundamentalists have also been known to picket Santa Claus in malls (or even to point out that Santa is an anagram of Satan), refer to Christmas trees as "Baal bushes", and the like.
 * In November 2018, a religious education teacher in Pickering, North Yorkshire, UK, declared that their school was banning Christmas because the holiday was too commercialised and not sufficiently focused on Jesus. The ban was later reversed, but may have been a stunt to get the kids to think more deeply about baby Jesus in the manger. In any case, it was another instance of Christians (temporarily) banning Christmas.
 * In the Soviet Union, Christmas was abolished as a religious holiday and replaced with New Year, which is still much more popular than Christmas in Russia (and much of the rest of the former USSR) to this day.

Actual peace on Christmas


The Christmas Truce of 1914 was a relatively widespread phenomenon that occurred in the trenches of World War One. However, the high commands of all sides involved quickly quashed this display of brotherly love, adding another brief page to the War on Christmas.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono declared the Vietnam War over in 1971 with their song "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)". Unfortunately, the war lasted until 1975.

Easter: The next battlefield
Following the COVID-19 pandemic and many statewide social-distancing orders against public gatherings, some churches have resisted having internet church services in favor of in-person services, declaring a "war on Easter". Reverend Rodney Howard-Browne of Florida was arrested for unlawful assembly; his previous claim to fame was giving away AR-15s at his church and encouraging congregants to bring their guns to church. Pastor Tony Spell of Louisiana was also charged with misdemeanors for holding an in-person church gathering.

War on Thanksgiving?
In 2019 and 2020, some figures on the right, including then-President Trump, alleged that Thanksgiving was being targeted by liberals for banishment and/or renaming due to its associations with white colonialism and the genocide of Native Americans.