Defending Christmas from Christians “defending” Christmas

Among the many inanities of the “defenders” of Christmas like Bill O’Reilly and his ilk is the way they’ve actually accepted that Christmas isn’t the religious holiday (a tautology.  It’s a holy-day) they claim to want to keep it.

Their Christmas is what Lucy tells Charlie Brown Christmas is, a racket run by a big syndicate of corporations.  Demanding that store clerks and other underpaid, overworked functionaries who have to face a grumpy public this time of year say “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays” is just demanding that they change the empty words they use to cover up the message they’re really delivering on behalf of the syndicate, which is:

“Thank you for spending gobs of money with us and come back soon to spend more gobs, please, we’re begging you!”

A supposedly devout Catholic like O’Reilly brags of being ought to know that, at least according to his own Church’s teachings, it’s inappropriate to wish anyone a Merry Christmas before December 25th, because that’s when the Christmas season actually begins.  It continues through January 6th, but I’ll bet even O’Reilly doesn’t keep wishing people a Merry Christmas right up until the Feast of the Three Kings.  This is why the nativity scene inside churches, doesn’t include the baby Jesus, if it goes up at all, before midnight on Christmas day.  At our church, the trees and poinsettias don’t appear on the altar until just before the first mass on Christmas eve.  The only Christmas decoration for through the first four Sundays of December is the Advent Wreath.  And no Christmas carols are sung at the masses until the night of the 24th, and they’re only allowed to make the little children happy.  Adults are expected to make due for twenty-odd days with the deliberately lugubrious and gloom-inducing "O Come, O Come Emmanuel” until we can leap up and sing out, off-key but with hearts soaring, “Joy to the World” on Christmas day.

The holiday season during which O’Reilly wants us all going about with Merry Christmas on our lips is the shopping season, which begins on October 30th, when the Halloween decorations come down and the Christmas junk appears on the shelves and the Christmas muzak starts to blare nonstop and the sales begin, and which has as its high holy day Black Friday.

Jesus ain’t the reason for the season.  The reason for the season as far as stores and those of us who crowd them desperately is buying and selling. 

The reason for the season, every year, good times and bad, is to keep the stock prices high for the corporations that own the big box stores or supply those stores with the junk the rest of us have convinced ourselves we have to put under the Christmas tree or the holiday will be ruined.

Too many of us think that the point of it all is saving fifty bucks on a PS3 or snapping up the last of the Zhu Zhu pets, which will be available on ebay by the boxful come December 26th.

Like I said, under these circumstances “Merry Christmas,” “Happy Holidays” and “Season’s Greetings” all mean the same thing.

“Cash or credit?”

If O’Reilly really wanted to put the Christ back in X-mas (and since he’s such a good Catholic he knows that the X is itself a religious icon because it’s Christ’s initial in Greek and it sort of looks like the Cross) he’d be telling his viewers that they should take themselves out of the stores and go to church or volunteer at a food pantry or visit the sick or send a donation a charity with which they can include a note that says “Merry Christmas” and means it.

But, nope, he insists that all that’s needed to make our shopping experience merry and bright is for a (possibly Jewish) minimum wage worker going into her seventh hour straight standing at a cash register to wish us a Merry Christmas along with asking if we need extra batteries with that.

So, as you can guess, I’m a fan of the Advent Conspiracy and was glad to read this article in TIME:

Church Group Attacks Christmas Commercialism

…to a growing group of Christians, the focus on the commercial aspect of Christmas is the greatest threat to one of Christianity's holiest days. "It's the shopping, the going into debt, the worrying that 'If I don't spend enough money, someone will think I don't love them,' " says Portland, Ore., pastor Rick McKinley. "Christians get all bent out of shape over the fact that someone didn't say 'Merry Christmas' when I walked into the store. But why are we expecting the store to tell our story? That's just ridiculous."

<snip>

The idea for a different kind of war on Christmas came to McKinley four years ago, when he was sitting around with some of his pastor friends and they realized they were all dreading Christmas. "None of us like Christmas," he says, adding, "That's sort of bad if you're a pastor." Instead of helping their congregations focus on the season of Advent and prepare to celebrate the birth of Christ, the pastors found themselves competing with a secular consumerism that made December the hardest time to make their message heard.

I like what that pastor says about how ridiculous it is to expect stores to tell the Christmas story as if the return line at the Gap is the only place to go to hear a reading of Luke 2:8-14.

I also liked that this is one of the first major articles I’ve seen in a venue like TIME that acknowledges that there are other sorts and conditions of Christians in America than the angry Right Wing Fundamentalists who’ve allowed their pastors to turn their churches into annexes of Republican Party Headquarters and who seem to think Jesus preached a gospel of fear and loathing, of vanity, self-righteousness, intolerance, exclusion, bigotry, and, by the way, storing up treasures on earth, and whom the Media covers as if not only were they the Christian mainstream but as though their version of Christianity is quaint and cuddly and they are just regular folks trying in their modest way to make their way to heaven without bothering anybody else or trying to bar the way to anybody following a different path there.

And as if when these people say Merry Christmas to strangers they don’t come close to spitting it on other people the way Antonio used to spit on Shylock and as if they didn’t mean “Go to hell!”

Of course, anyone who insists that everybody go around wishing each other a Merry Christmas either has no non-Christian friends, relatives, neighbors, or colleagues or doesn’t give a damn about their feelings or gives a damn in the sense of wanting to hurt them or is just a moron.

A source of mine who works at the local paper fielded a call from an incensed reader who, reacting to a story about a giant menorah that a nearby city had put up on a bridge for Hanukkah, demanded to know “Why isn’t there a Christmas tree up anywhere?”

My source asked the man if he had read the stories in the newspaper about the Christmas tree lighting in his town, and the one in the town next to that, and in the town next to that, and downtown in the city with the menorah on the bridge, and in every town and city and hamlet in the entire country except for Kiryas Joel?

“Um…” the man said.

I’m not sure if my source asked him or wishes she had, “You’re a big fan of Bill O’Reilly, aren’t you?”

But before she hung up on him she did wish him, “Happy Holidays!”

Comments

[lingin]

I was waiting for my order at a Starbucks in NYC a couple of Saturdays ago when I spotted a button on the backpack of a man standing next to me. "It's okay to wish me a Merry Christmas."

[Lance]

Linda,

Any chance the guy was Jewish?

Or Muslim, Hindu, Shinto, or Buddhist?

[Rana]

Thank you! I love the holiday of the food, lights, greenery, song, and family.

Increasingly, though, I am forgoing the commercial holiday - if I can get through the 25th without entering a mall or loading down my family with more useless stuff to store, I feel I'm doing well. We always waited until the 24th to get a tree anyway (half price!), and that's now carried over into shopping in January, after the fact. Too much stuff, too little money, and too little time to waste fighting mall traffic and crowds when we could be together going for a walk, playing board games, or making cookies.

[PurpleGirl]

Good post, Lance. I want to buy a pine tree today or tomorrow to have in the house for the solstice.

I saw a woman on the bus with same button.

I remember a Keep Christ in Christmas campaign back in the 1970s at least. Many people have been concerned about the commercialization for a long time. I'd need more time to do a proper historical search, though; a quick Google got me only recent and current blog posts.

[Rana]

Have you seen the incredibly mean-spirited dog-in-Jesus'-manger screed that Garrison Keillor recently posted on this?

[El Jefe]

As a Unitarian heretic who hangs out with those "other sorts of Christians" (an American [read Rhode Island] Baptist congregation that's been the denomination's only gay-rights church in OR for almost thirty years, small-town locale but our pastor knows McKinley) I'm a big AC fan too. Not surprised to see you talk it up in this context, Lance, but cheered.

You've been on a roll with your political-economy posts since about late summer when you said clearly what lots of other people talk around or choose dogmatically to ignore: ninety percent of it all is a hundred percent feudalism, whether the formal feudalism of the Soviet commissariats or the ruthless bastard feudalism of corporate capital. Give 'em a big enough engine to make money and the icy call of lordship grips their hearts. Fusty as he was Schultz could see that too, which is why he put those words in Lucy's mouth and almost single-handedly killed the aluminum Christmas tree in the bargain, bless him (goes right up there with Jack Parr taking out Walter Winchell and Stewart/Colbert taking on, well, every damn body.)

As to the actual sermon content for the tag, storing up treasures on earth indeed. My father, who fled his Southern Baptist childhood quick as he could, can tell you almost to the Sunday in the late 1950s when admonitions about camels and needles dropped out of the sermonizing. The Advent Conspiracy folks may just be packing enough irony in their holster to make something happen.

[El Jefe]

P.S. to Lance and Linda,

I'm betting Animist. Or maybe a follower of the Nameless Ones; you know, like those bumper stickers that read "Cthulhu/Dagon '08: Why Vote For the Lesser Evil?"

[El Jefe]

Two last things:

Rana, I'm with you on holiday contents, particularly the food. Since our youngest daughter was born punctually on Jan. 6th we do the twelve days which makes a glorious feast cycle and loads cheaper on the giving of gifts where appropriate.

Also for Lance's source a mitzvah from Steve and Eydie who do not seem to have consumerism so much on their minds:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3D1I79mUdTQ

[actor212]

Jesus would spin in his grave if he knew the enormous gobs of money we handed to the corporate Sanhedrin and Pharisees each December in His name. If He knew we not only rendered unto Caesar that which was Caesar's, but gave to Caesar that which is God, our worship, He would storm FOX studios and smite the crew until they agreed to a Fairness Doctrine-like rebuttal.

And then He'd ask us why we spend when we should give.

[lingin]

Lance -- I couldn't tell if the guy with the button was being passive-aggressive of just being considerate of other people who wanted to give a holiday greeting.

You got it right about the nastiness and meanness that underlies this "War on Christmas" crap. I'm Jewish and it has never bothered me if someone wishes me a Merry Christmas or sends me a Christmas card. But the demands of the O'Reillys and Becks and their ilk to insist on Merry Christmas being THE greeting. However, I haven't run into anybody that takes issue with Happy Holidays so I guess this is the usual Village idiots trying to make something out of nothing.