How to Win the War Against Christmas
In the seven years since my first essay on the War Against Christmas appeared in Chronicles, I have had no trouble writing at least one such essay per year, because each year brings new and outrageous attempts to suppress the public celebration of Christmas. My favorite example was the 2002 winner of VDare.com’s invaluable War Against Christmas Competition that I analyzed in The American Conservative in Christmas 2003. The Columbus, Ohio, schools banned a performance of Handel’s Messiah, which for the previous nine years had been the highlight of the year at a specialized school for the arts. The performance would have violated the district’s religious-music policy, which came into being as the result of an ACLU lawsuit.
According to the Columbus Dispatch, the policy stipulated that the proportion of religious music performed in concert be no more than 30 percent and that the performance of religious music be “based on sound curricular reasons” and not “manifest a preference for religion or particular religious beliefs.” The educational bureaucrats who devised the policy, trying to be helpful, suggested the students perform “Frosty the Snowman” or “Jingle Bells” instead of Handel. Their ignorance and philistinism are appalling, though characteristic of those waging the War Against Christmas. After hearing Messiah performed in London, Haydn was moved to exclaim that “Handel is the master of us all!” and to write his own great oratorio, The Creation. But, in today’s climate of “sensitivity” and “tolerance,” beauty and artistic merit are scarcely a sufficient warrant for exposing delicate ears to the name of Christ.
This example, precisely because it is so appalling, gives us a clear idea of what is at stake in the War Against Christmas. As I wrote in The American Conservative, “The result of sanitizing Christmas is now within sight: an undistinguished, uninspiring public celebration, devoid of religious or cultural significance or indeed of beauty, with nothing left but multiculturalist pap and tawdry commercialism.” The War Against Christmas is a part of the larger war against the heritage of the West. It goes by such names as “multiculturalism,” “political correctness,” and “cultural Marxism” and seeks to destroy the traditional culture of the West and, ultimately, the West itself. Although embittered atheists are often shock troops in the War Against Christmas, the hostility to religion is noticeably selective: The public celebration in America of Hanukkah, Ramadan, and Diwali as faux-Christmases (even though the Islamic lunar calendar is taking Ramadan further and further away from December) has never been more pronounced. This is not happening by accident, nor is it restricted to America. As the Daily Mail reported on November 1, 2007, a Labour think tank had urged that Christmas be “downgraded” as part of an “urgent and upfront campaign” to promote a “multicultural understanding of Britishness,” and part of this campaign is the elevation of non-Christian holidays with temporal proximity to Christmas.
However, none of this is irreversible. As I wrote on VDare.com during Christmas in 2003, there are several mundane steps that would help in the effort to make Christmas again a time for joyous and beautiful public celebration. We need to let movie studios, retailers, school boards, and politicians know that those of us who love Christmas vastly outnumber the malcontents, and that we do not appreciate what has happened to the public celebration of our holiday. We need, in essence, a new Legion of Decency, an organization that helped ensure both that Hollywood did not make movies assaulting Christmas and that it made movies that celebrated Christmas, including such classics from Hollywood’s Golden Age as It’s a Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street, The Bishop’s Wife, and The Bells of St. Mary’s, the movie being shown in Bedford Falls as George Bailey runs down its snowy streets on Christmas Eve. Boycotting bad movies works. Last year Hollywood celebrated Christmas by releasing The Golden Compass, a movie based on Philip Pullman’s atheist children’s trilogy. Once word got out about who Pullman was and what he believed, the movie tanked at the U.S. box office, and it is now unlikely that the two planned sequels will ever be made.
Numbers are surely on our side. Polls show that up to 96 percent of Americans celebrate Christmas. This effort need not be entirely negative—even though some polite, forceful complaining will be necessary. We can start wishing others “Merry Christmas” again. We can buy only cards that mention Christmas and let both the retailer and the card maker know why we are doing that. On our Christmas cards that actually mention Christmas we can make a point of using only the USPS’s Christmas stamp, and we can tell them why we prefer that stamp to the generic “Season’s Greetings” alternative. (Indeed, only a popular outcry saved the Christmas stamp from the p.c. chopping block in the mid-1990’s.) We can patronize retailers who actually mention the holiday that is the source of their good fortune and tell them why we prefer to shop there. We can also share essays on the War Against Christmas with our friends and relatives: People are much more likely to act when they realize they are not alone, and others have expressed sentiments they share but have been reluctant to voice.
At a deeper level, we need to cultivate the traditions that make Christmas special in our own homes, churches, and communities. From an early age, I learned from what I saw and experienced that the gifts brought by Santa were only a tiny part of the reason why Christmas was special. It was when our home looked special, when we brought out ornaments we had cherished for years, and some my dad had kept from his childhood, to put on our tree; when we ate the same dinner on Christmas Eve that our family had eaten for centuries; and when we listened to some of the exquisite music inspired by Christmas, including the beautiful Polish carols I have loved my whole life and the music my uncle and my cousin’s wife played for us on the cello and violin at our Christmas Eve dinner. Such things did not happen anytime else during the year, and they helped instill in me a lasting love for Christmas and a desire to learn about and experience more facets of the celebration of Christmas.
In cultivating the traditions of Christmas, we are also being nourished by some of the deepest wellsprings of Western civilization. Over the course of centuries, the celebration of Christmas became splendid and multifaceted, a testament to the genius of our civilization and a holiday that, because of its cultural significance, can be and is enjoyed even by those who do not believe in Christ. As Paula Simons, a non-Christian, wrote in the Edmonton Journal five years ago,
Traditional Christmas carols are beautiful songs. They combine rich, lyric poetry with melodies of timeless power. A child who grows up hearing and singing the likes of God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen or Silent Night . . . or the other great world classics gets a profound musical education. The intricate harmonies and modalities of real carols don’t just move our hearts. They train our ears to appreciate more sophisticated musical forms and our voices to sing in concert with others.
She is exactly right. No other festival has inspired even a tiny fraction of such great music. For those seeking a bright-line test on how to treat competing winter holidays, I have suggested equal emphasis on all winter holidays which have had music written for them by Johann Sebastian Bach. And Simons’ comments point to yet another way the War Against Christmas can be won.
Christmas is, of course, a celebration of the birth of Christ and the mystery of the Incarnation. But it is also the celebration that most helped shape the West. As Thomas Cahill explains in his Mysteries of the Middle Ages,
Roman Christians found their attention drawn to the most down-to-earth aspect of the Trinitarian doctrine: the Infleshing, the Incarnation, the Making of the God-Man. What, they asked themselves, are the practical consequences—to human beings—of the Word becoming Flesh? From this question will flow, with some notable divagations, the main course of what was to become Western Christianity.
Although Roman Christians “agreed in principle” with their Greek coreligionists that Easter was the “supreme Christian feast,” “in practice they came to prefer Christmas.” And this preference for Christmas had profound consequences.
Cahill tells the charming story of how Saint Francis of Assisi created the first crèche at Midnight Mass in Greccio. In the words of Saint Bonaventure, Francis “made ready a manger, and bade hay, together with an ox and an ass, be brought unto the place.” Cahill particularly focuses on why the saint did this: “I wish to make a memorial of that child who was born in Bethlehem and, as far as possible, behold with bodily eyes the hardships of his infant state, lying on hay in a manger with the ox and the ass standing by.” By trying to recreate “as far as possible” what had happened in Bethlehem, Francis had, according to Cahill, asked a “wholly new question,” a question that was “historical, emotional, particular, and human: what would it have been like to be there?” This emphasis on realism, so different from the Christian iconography that characterized Eastern religious art, meant that “In the town of Greccio on Christmas night in 1223 were born the arts as we still know them."
A generation later, Giotto, “throughout his adult life a Franciscan tertiary,” painted that scene in Greccio in fresco in the magnificent basilica built to commemorate Francis in Assisi, and the first Christmas is part of his equally famous frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. Giotto’s
eucharistic Catholicism, informed by a Franciscan spirit, pushed him toward a nearly scientific quest to reproduce more exactingly in art the very things his eyes could see, his hands could touch, his heart could love—and preeminently among these lovable things was the human body itself.
And this realism, grounded in the incarnational theology of the Western Church, had a profound impact:
[Giotto’s] work is done. His influence on generations to come, whether direct or indirect, on sculptors as well as painters, on Renaissance and modern artists as well as late-medieval ones—on Pisano, Ghiberti, Donatello, the Della Robbias, Fra Angelico, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, and Mantegna, on the inevitable trio of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael, and perhaps especially on that most inspired supernaturalist Caravaggio—will be immeasurable. . . . And that is how life became art.
Thus, it is no exaggeration to state that the Western artistic tradition is inextricably linked to the celebration of Christmas.
We should never tire of emphasizing this, and of reminding those who wish to “downgrade” Christmas of all they are denigrating. The indisputable cultural significance of Christmas should sweep aside any fair-minded objections to its public celebration and reveal those who still object to be motivated by a hatred of Christmas or of Christianity or of the West, as indeed many of those waging the War Against Christmas are. If the War Against Christmas is to be won, it will be by remembering who we are and how we got here, and by summoning the courage to defend the great legacy bequeathed us by those who went before.
Contributing editor Tom Piatak writes from Cleveland, Ohio.
This article first appeared in the December 2008 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.
Entries(RSS)
Excellent post.
One upshot of the current economic correction is that many folk -- one can find them blogging, emailing, chatting around the office -- are downplaying the commercial aspects of the holiday and longing to enjoy more fully the spiritual meaning of Christmas.
It's likely that Christianity will be completely extinguished from "offical" civic life (perhaps it already has), but the intensity of faith I find among my fellow workers encourages me that it will, as in the days of tyrannical Caesars, continue to live and shine.
Their relentlessness demonstrates that they know they haven't defeated Christ's Church. If they'd succeeded in relegating Christianity to the realm of mythology, they'd have no objections like you describe above e.g. Handel.
Our Knights of Columbus are filling the community with "Keep Christ in Christmas" signs, to which I'll add in our yard a "Keep the Mass in Christmas" homemade poster.
It's sad that the American hostility to Christmas has Protestant as well as atheistic roots. Puritans banned the use of Christmas trees and did not celebrate the Incarnation in any formal way. In the 19th century it was a serious matter of contention that immigrant Catholics made glorious public liturgies in a season that mainstream Protestants were reluctant to recognize. The current form of the controversy results, I think, from the very ugly commercialization that almost all Christians find obnoxious.
A noble crusade, Tom. Keep it going, and I'll try to help.
The First Advent, anchored in its beginning with the miracle of the Incarnation and in its ending with the miracle of the Resurrection and punctuated with all of the miracles of Christ, leaves those of us whom God has graced with His light a great hope, the hope of His Second Advent. It is in that hope that we have the courage to live out the Gospel in word and in deed and to be agents of beauty and goodness in a world in desparate need thereof. As long as each Christian lives out the Christ, our Kinsman Redeemer through His finished work on the Cross, there is no danger that Christmas will disappear, though it be assailed by all of the forces which our ancient adversary can bring to bear.
John Willson,
"It’s sad that the American hostility to Christmas has Protestant as well as atheistic roots."
Could you replace "Protestant" with "Puritan."
Not Anglicans and Lutherans.
Bruce @ 6
Well, Low-Church Anglicans are a bit different. They too may have problems with Christmas celebrations, since they share so many of the presuppositions and prejudices of Dissenters.
It should be remembered that when Dickens wrote "A Christmas Carol," a great deal of anti-Christmas Puritanism had segued right into the savage capitalism of the early English industrialist and business types. Scrooge is both Low-Church puritanical in his attitudes, and dog-eat-dog businessman.
They must not have read the BCP. The (pre 1979) BCP is undeniably sacramental as shown by our prayer of humble access:
".... so to eat the flesh of our dear Lord Jesus Christ and to drink His blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by His body, and our souls washed through His most precious blood ..."
I thought Dickens and his type were Unitarians?
Mr. Peters (#5), your words remind me of the wonderful Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury. And for what it's worth, she was pretty "low church."
Bruce @ 8
Of course, all Anglicans in the past accepted the Book of Common Prayer, and the Thirty-Nine Articles. (Forget about now -- there isn't the slightest way to predict what an Anglican in 2008 believes. Many of them seem to be like the female Vicar of Dibley).
But Low-Church Anglicans (for example, the Simeonites of the 19th century) were very similar to the Dissenters in their attitudes. They were boringly Evangelical, they were violently anti-papist, they hated surplices and any other "Romish" accoutrements, and wanted a barebones service that that was miles away from a liturgy.
The religious views of Dickens aren't at issue. What matters is that he defended the older, medieval Christmas of fun and celebration and generosity.
The Puritans and other dissenters hated this medieval Christmas so much that they refused to celebrate the day at all, and even changed its name to "Christ-tide." Typical Evangelical crackpots.
Thank you, Mr. Salemi. The info on Low-Church Anglicans of the 19th century was interesting and I'll have to read more about the Simeonites.
"there isn’t the slightest way to predict what an Anglican in 2008 believes."
I agree wrt the Anglican Communion. However, those of us in the continuum have beliefs that are orthodox.
The question to be asked is: "Where are the Religious leaders in all this?"
Is seem to me the Catholic Church and other Protestant church members should be taking the lead on this. Where is Rick Warren and Dobson?
Frankly, I think the only way to stop the secularists is to be hit them in the pocket book. Stop the "tradition" of giving expensive gifts, and they will soon rediscover what a wonderful thing Christmas is.
Amen Pablo. We've no problem giving our kids gifts from the thrift store.
Yes, we have to STOP SPENDING. Even more than guns in the hands of private citizens, the government is jackrabbit-terrified of the specter of millions of Americans simply saving their money.
The uglification/consumerification is perhaps more offensive, that is to say anti-Christ, than merely excising the explicit confession of the Incarnate: not everyone who says 'Lord, Lord' is one of His, but (only) those who serve Him, that is, follow Him, that is, love the world to death. The nice thing about Christmas -- what the Medievals most loved about it -- is that it is simple joy, without even the terrible weight of glory. The Cross will indeed come, and then indeed Resurrection, but now just ahead appears only the warmly humble Virgin Birth.
We today perhaps understand Crucifixion better than Incarnation, because we understand death better than new life; this makes our modern hope for Resurrection is explicitly romantic, which is to say, self-consciously vain. Some perverted, semi-nihilist notion of sacrifice still lingers in modern society (though having lost real, not romantic, reward). (This is, for example, a striking feature of American cinema, with a pervasiveness and to a degree that neither Europe nor Asia can boast nearly as much.) But is there *anything* properly modern, that is *remotely* anything like the quietly exultant joy of Christmas?
"The War Against Christmas is a part of the larger war against the heritage of the West."
In the introduction to The Conservative Bookshelf, Chilton Williamson made a statement that gave me pause and it has stayed in the back of my mind ever since. It was essentially that the attacks on Western Civilization are a "convenient cover" for their real target for destruction, Christianity. I think this issue is sometimes confused in conservative discourse. We should make no mistake, they are trying to destroy our Faith.
In other words, the larger war, I believe, is the one against Christianity.
@17, Josh Cooney, righto, and it has been going on ever since Christ entered His public ministry, but most especially, since the Protestant Revolt.
Mike Jones outlined the origin of the Legion of Decency in a talk he gave in Philadelphia some years ago. In the mid thirties, if recollection serves, the local Ordinary issued a directive, informing the faithful that viewing certain films incurred serious sin---in the old days this was called mortal---and thus began a boycott of morally objectionable films. The economic impact on the movie producers caused them, in Mike's reporting, to weep tears as big as horse turds. The producers came hat in hand to see what could be done. The result was the Legion.
Two short comments, in reply to several posts above: First, I would surely accept the term "Puritan," since so much of American Protestantism derives from it, in either its fundamental or secularized versions. Second, here's a practical way of celebrating Christmas. My rather large family has decided to take what we otherwise might have spent on worthless "gifts" and instead giving all of it to a worthy cause. And I certainly don't mean the United Way! Last year we gave to the Lingap Foundation, which sponsors a Christian orphanage in the Philippines. This year it will be to the Church, which at least in our local parish uses its money well. Next year it might be a local family that has been rendered destitute by the newest of our government's geniuses. At any rate, it won't go to WallyWorld.
Many good comments here. Mr. Willson -- great ideas! Making donations (always to Christian-related charities) is one good strategy. As for physical gifts I usually buy perishable items, like cakes and other hand-made goods, from monasteries. For the young relatives I usually give cash.
Bruce, Dickens was simply Dickens. Like many men he held diverse (a nice way of saying "contradictory") opinions and can't really be pinned down in religions terms, but rather had his Unitarian (I would call it antinomian) tendencies on one hand, and yet could be medieval leaning, as Mr. Salemi pointed out regarding Christmas.
He had no love of Catholicism, especially the Oxford movement, and the Anglo-Catholics. I doubt he was a practicing, incarnational/sacramental Christian, and yet compare him (and almost every famous Victorian novelist, no more pious than he) to the agnosticism/atheism of today's fiction, though, and see the difference. Enjoy it in Victorian literature (especially Dickens) because that world is gone. Every generation demonizes the one before it, which is why it is now fashionable to hate "Victorian" things. "Humbug" I say to that.
Thanks, Tom P., for a great article!
For starters, the faithful can fast during Advent, and celebrate after Christmas -- Bright Week -- when the orgy of consumerism that seems to begin around Labor Day has burnt itself out.
I always felt fortunate growing up in the Orthodox Christian faith. It was such a pleasure celebrating Christmas on January 7th long after the empty consumerism had passed...just family and faith remained.
Nowadays, as a protest to those trying to destroy Christmas, I celebrate on December 25th and on January 7th.
In the mountains of Southern Appalachia (where I'm from) the old-timers used to observe "Old Christmas," the same date as Daniel mentions above. It is referenced in folktales, literature, and a fiddle tune of the same name.
The paternal and the maternal sides of my family infused, over the generations of their respective contributions to Advent and to Christmas, some wonderful traditions and activities into our familial celebrations.
Most, although not all, of the grandchildren of my generation memorized the Christmas story, begin with Isaiah 9:6, through Matthew and Luke, including passages from John 3. I am quite often asked to "tell" the story in schools, churches and other venues.
All of us cousins were taught to and most of us still tithe to through our local congreations. In addition, my local church affords us the opportunity to give to the Lottie Moon Christmas offering for foreign missions, food boxes for Christmas which are put together for local people in need and the Frank Graham Operation Christmas Child, a ministry in which families and churches cooperate to send gifts of need - soap, wash clothes, tooth brushes, tooth paste, etc - to children across the world.
Until my father died a little over two years ago, he and my mother, for the fifty-seven years of their marriage took baskets of food - pecans, Louisiana navel oranges, a ham, dried fruit and homemade candy - to the needy and the aged among their circle of friends and acquaintances.
There is, of course, so much more. Christmas meant and still means special smells: coconut, Louisiana satsumas, Louisiana navel oranges, homemade candy of all kinds, seeing friends and family, a Christmas ham, the smell of the Christmas tree. When I was young, we "harvested" Christmas trees by using a shotgun to shoot the tops out of pine trees. We always had a long leaf pine as a Christmas tree. The last time I shot a Christmas tree out of a tree was when I was nineteen. Upon these very comments on this forum I am moved to do that this week, although I will likely not; for the world has changed and at fifty-nine, my ability to hold a ten gauge shotgun at a forty-five to sixty degree angle and accurately fire it without knocking myself down and displacing my shoulder is quite suspect. But, indeed, shooting the "perfect" Christmas tree to which mother would exclaim, "It's beautiful!" is at least as satisfying as shooting a big buck with a good rack, which was also likely to take place around Christmas.
The celebration of the birth of our Savior is indeed good!
Here's another way to keep Christmas: Attend classical choral Chistmas concerts by ensembles that still perfrom classic sacred works and carols. I live in Milwaukee. Years ago Christmas choral concerts were frequently sold-out events. Now only the big-name groups sell out and that's usually for their secular pops concerts. The smaller, but still very good, groups struggle to get a meager audience; I know I'm in one.
Most of these groups perform in churches, so the setting is appropriate and intimate. The music usually is better than what you would get from a church choir to boot.
I second Mr. Wihowski's excellent suggestion.
I say let them wage war on Christmas, and if they win so what!!!! The early Christians did not celebrate Chrsitmas and the day(DEC 25) was only picked to co opt the Carnivalesque holiday of Saturnalia. Even after its adoption it didn't become big til the Victorian age which helped kick off Santa Claus and the out of control gift giving. Christmas is nothing more than a feast of hyper consumerism. Moms fighting over toys at Toys R US, Walmart workers getting crushed, etc is what it is all about. Forget this peace on earth goodwill to men crap!!!!!!! Give me my Ipod or Playstation 3 game!!!!!! In a rather insincere way, people pay there 1 hour homage to Christ/ tradition every Christmas eve then go home to enjoy there new found toys. In a way we have gone full circle. Christmas co opted a pagan holiday, now a neopagan holiday(hyper consumerism) has co opted Christmas. In conclusion, there are a hell of a lot more important things for Christians to worry about than a holiday that for the most part has lost its meaning already.
I never could understand why the commercialization of Christmas caused people to throw the baby out with the bathwater. But Chesterton helped me to understand it is an antinomian attitude, when he wrote a century ago :
"I saw a statement by Mrs. Eddy on this subject (Christmas presents) in which she said that she did not give presents in a gross, sensuous, terrestrial sense, but sat still and thought about Truth and Purity till all her friends were much better for it.....I do not know that there is any Scriptural text or Church Council that condemns Mrs. Eddy's theory, but Christianity condemns it, as soldiering condemns running away.
"The idea of embodying goodwill -- that is, of putting it into a body -- is the huge and primal idea of the Incarnation. A gift of God that can be seen and touched is the whole point of the epigram of the creed. Christ himself was a Christmas present."
@29 - Things have changed completely since Chesterton wrote. Eddy was considered a minor crank when Chesterton attacked her views. Today, Eddy's anti-Christmas viewpoint is shared by the entire establishment Different times require different responses.
@28, Robert Bruce: as much as I can sympathize with your cynicism toward Christmas, I cannot tolerate mistranslations of the Vulgate. The angels did not wish goodwill to men; instead "Et subito facta est cum Angelo multitudo militiae coelestis, laudantium Deum, et dicentium: Gloria in altissimus Deo, et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis." You'll note that "voluntatis" is third declension, feminine, singular, genitive case, and the adjective "bonae" agrees with it, so that the last phrase reads: "and on earth peace to men of good will."
Mr. Bruce,
There is considerable evidence that the date of Christmas was picked for reasons having nothing to do with Saturnalia: http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=16-10-012-v In fact, Prof. Tighe argues that by observing the Feast of the Unconquered Sun on Dec. 25, the Romans were trying to coopt the celebration of Christmas.
In addition, the notion that Christmas wasn't big until the Victorians is simply not true. Christmas was the major holiday of Western Christendom from early Medieval times at the latest, with profound cultural consequences, as I discuss in my piece.
Mr. Robert Bruce, correct my #31 to read, "as much as I can sympathize with your cynicism toward Christmas commercialized..."
Mr. Piatak, the link was very informative and timely. Thanks.
It may seem a small thing, but I reply to store clerks who sheepishly say,"Happy Holidays" with "and a merry Christmas to you!"
@32 Tom
The puritans from the time of Oliver Cromwell did indeed squelch Christmas. They had less luck with the pockets of Roman Catholics in England who gave us new carols like The 12 Days of Christmas.
But Prince Albert did introduce some German traditions into Victoria's England, notably the tree. This was ironic since the age of enlightened propsperity was causing many of the middle class to skip the church along with its teachings.
@34 Etienne Gervaise, yes, and I have been lucky, so far. This past week I had to get out for some maintenance on my car and some grocery shopping. At both places, I was wished a Merry Christmas by the service manager and the check out clerk. I was surprised, but glad, and returned the same wish to them. Maybe, there is a glimmering movement beginning in reaction to the oppression of political correctness.
Etienne Gervaise:
And don't forget the most famous carol given to us by English Catholics, "Adeste Fideles," written by an English Catholic exile following the '45.
J. Meng:
Yes, I think there are a number of signs this year of a backlash against political correctness at this time of year.
Another way to celebrate Christmas is to burn a couple of hundred CDs, and pass them out to friends family, co-workers and sometimes complete strangers. I started doing it with cassettes back in the 80s when I was an "evangelical." Many fellow-parishioners did not own one single Christmas LP or tape, so I would make a couple of dozen to pass out at church.
I made sure that the carols were historically church music, and if modern, needed to relate to the Nativity. I'll be Home For Christmas, Jingle Bells, and Winter Wonderland are now standard repertoire on many so-called Christian CDs. Perhaps that explains why nobody buys them. In case you think people would be offended, you're wrong. My customers -- about whom I know nothing of their faith -- ask if I've made a new one and when will I be giving them out. The number is now up to 500! I could easily dish out more if I started at Thanksgiving.
It's begun an awful trend though, my Iranian dentist mails them out too. Nothing offensive on her CDs!
I stand corrected, but you are missing my second point. Thing is why are you so worried about Christmas when the more drastic problems are within the church itself? The great Christian apologist Josh McDowell in a speech made before a large gathering of college kids estimated that 90% of self labeled Christians really weren't well Christian. What I see today is what can be called Christian anarchy, where folks take what they want out of the Bible to suit there own views. I mean you have churchgoers of all political persuasions, that support abortion, perpetual war, gay marriage, etc. In a large part of the church synods in the US, there virtually is no sin anymore, as the churches try to keep the butts in the seats by changing with the culture. In fact the megachurch movement is nothing more than the corporatization of the church. Think Christ kicked butt with those moenychangers in the temple? Wow he would really kick some butt with these televagelists today!!!!!! I am sorry, but this War on Christmas stuff is small potatoes, compared to what really is killing Christianity off.
How come Tom Piatak picture is in black and white while the rest of Chronicles columnists are in colour?
My impression was that not only in traditionally Eastern Orthodox countries like Greece and Russia, but also southern Roman Catholic countries like Italy definitely take Easter more seriously than Christmas, not only in liturgical life but also in popular culture. The areas that ended up celebrating Christmas more vigorously were the northern, Germanic countries that eventually became Protestant (perhaps because of the pagan Yuletide feast, which did not exist in the Roman areas).
On this note, it´s probably worth noting that even the Protestant Handel´s Messiah was originally intended to be performed at Easter. It´s only modern secularist tastes that have pushed it back to Christmas, as the only Christian holiday that´s still popular.
The point one commenter made about the ancient Christian origins of Christmas is extremely interesting. Clearly in that respect Old Rome preserved the traditional date, since in the East it had fallen out of use, with Theophany (Epiphany) serving to celebrate both Christ´s birth and his baptism. The separate celebration of Christmas was reintroduced in New Rome around the time John Chrysostom was Archbishop. The Armenians, who shortly afterwards broke communion with Constantinople, still keep the Eastern custom of the time, celebrating Christ´s birth on Epiphany.
Excellent article, Tom.
I wish a merry Chistmas to all the good people here.