Throughout the land this joyous season the righteous refrain resounds: "Let Christmas be Christmas!"
Enough with the Happy "Holidays," cry the heavenly hosts of Fox News, let the yearly festival of greed and gluttony recover its rightful name. They espy a liberal conspiracy to secularize our Christian land by denying us the very birth of our Saviour!
Until they get to this paranoid complaint, they have a point. The move in recent decades toward calling the end of December "the holidays" has behind it more than a touch of—forgive me, Father, for invoking this wretched term—"political correctness." It betrays the deathless doctrine of contemporary progressives, that everything will be all right if we just change the words. This idea has saturated the language with tiresome neologisms without noticeably reducing social injustice, so some skepticism is in order.
Besides, the festival that we call "Christmas," although cloaked in sacred robes, has gathered to itself an array of traditions and rites as polyglot as the nation itself, trees from Germany, cards from Britain, stockings from Holland. And people of other faiths, and of no faith at all, have bought into the festival. Jews have decorated trees, Hindus have hung lights, even atheists give presents.
But with "the holidays" established as a nondenominational synonym, and especially with the right-wing uproar over it, any descriptor of this year-end period is freighted with politics. Is that retailer simply selling "Christmas" cards, is it sending a reactionary message, or has it caved to Christian pressure? If you offer vague "season's greetings," are you standing your ground for multiculturalism, hedging your bets or just being gracious?
You would think the outraged pietists would cleave to any semantic distinction between holy day and holiday, between the sacred observance of Christ's birth and the market carnival that has all but overwhelmed it. Writing recently in The New York Times, Adam Cohen noted the oddity of Christians clamoring for the commercialization of Christmas, and noted the country's "complicated history with Christmas, going back to the Puritans, who hated it."
Indeed, Christianity's history with Christmas has been complicated. The observance of Christ's birth on December 25th seems to have arisen in the fourth century, when the Emperor Constantine, the convert who Christianized the Roman Empire, redesignated a pagan sun-worship festival. As British scholar Daniel Miller observes in his introductory essay for Unwrapping Christmas (Oxford, 1993), which he edited, scholars have linked the traditions of excess and gift-giving to the Roman holidays of Saturnalia and Kalends. And they have recorded centuries of clerical dismay about this association.
Nonetheless, Christmas remained a minor event for the ensuing 14 centuries. Cromwell's Puritan Parliament outlawed its celebration, as did Puritan colonists in New England, who decreed Dec. 25 a work day like any other. Synthesizing earlier research, Miller points to a survey of the times which found scant mention of the holiday between 1790 and 1836. Scholars dispute that Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol single-handedly created the Christmas we know. But it contributed mightily, aided by the growth of a prosperous middle class in Europe and the United States, and the Victorian regime of sentimentality of which Dickens was the chief exponent.
Unwrapping Christmas includes an essay by the venerable anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, translated by Diana Gittins. "Father Christmas Executed" originally appeared in Les Temps modernes in March 1952, months after the event to which Lévi-Strauss refers in the title. Clerics in Dijon coordinated a children's effigy-burning of Père Noël, on Christmas Eve, to protest the "paganizing" of Christmas.
Though no doubt they would cringe to find themselves associated with France in any way, American conservatives echo this protest. France strictly divides church and state—it even banned the wearing of Muslim headwear in schools. Lévi-Strauss quotes a news report about the immolation of Père Noël: "Above all he was blamed for infiltrating all the state schools from which the crib has been scrupulously banned." Sound familiar?
Lévi-Strauss saw a unique opportunity to probe a cult in the making, the Americanizing of Christmas. Although celebrations had been expanding before World War II, after it the French embodiment of Santa Claus "expanded in a way unknown since before the war," writes Lévi-Strauss, who ties the phenomenon to the postwar influence of American media and aid. He outlines how the modern rites draw on ancient practices, and ties them to timeless, universal observances—both to rites of passage and to rites celebrating the cycle of existence.
This is what Christmas is about, negotiation between generations and between life and death. The Christian story, of course, powerfully expresses the ancient renewal theme. Christians might well exult that their celebration remains the centerpiece of what has become a cross-cultural, global feast, whatever it's called. It is not "the holidays" but commercial clutter that crowds out the spirit.
Chuck Twardy has written for newspapers and magazines for more than 20 years. His website,
www.members.cox.net/theanteroom, has a forum.