A War Worth Winning
As someone who has written on the War Against Christmas for both Chronicles and VDARE.COM since 2001, it should come as no surprise that my perspective is different from Thomas Fleming's. I welcome anyone, Christian or non-Christian, who is willing to defend this matchless holiday, and look with suspicion on all those who are hostile to Christmas, whether they are multiculturalists, secularists, or Christian purists whose arguments resemble those of the Puritans who did succeed in suppressing Christmas for a time in both England and parts of America.
Growing up, I loved the whole thing: going to the wonderfully decorated Higbee's and May's department stores in downtown Cleveland (anyone who has ever seen A Christmas Story has seen the main floor of Higbee's decorated for Christmas); 'Twas the Night Before Christmas, which my Dad read to my sister and me on Christmas Eve and which my sister now reads to her children on Christmas Eve; driving down neighborhood streets to view the decorated houses; welcoming carolers to our door, and singing Christmas carols in my public school and at Mass; listening to Christmas records—including some by Andy Williams—while we decorated the house; and having our traditional Polish Christmas Eve dinner, which helped mark Christmas Eve as the most special night of the year for me. The view I formed of Christmas, as I wrote in The American Conservative at Christmas 2003, was that it "was a special and wonderful time of year, marked by kindness and good cheer, with its myriad celebrations all . . . ultimately stemming from the birth of the One who, in Dickens' words, 'made lame beggars walk and blind men see.'"
Despite my objections to the War Against Christmas, I have seen no reason to change this basic view. The American Christmas I grew up with was fundamentally good, and it deserves a defense against those who seek its demise. It is true, as Dr. Fleming writes, that Christianity would survive even if "We could eliminate all Christmas music ever written, outlaw Christmas trees and figgie pudding [and] carry out Scrooge's wish: 'If I could work my will any idiot who goes around with a Merry Christmas on his lips would be cooked with his own turkey and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.'" Christianity also survived the catacombs and the Gulag, but I have no desire to live in either. And our world would be much poorer if Christmas trees and Christmas music were to disappear.
Worrying about the theological shortcomings of Charles Dickens comes close to the Puritan logic that began by objecting to revelry and merrymaking at Christmas and ended up objecting to the whole thing. Indeed, the profusion of great art and music surrounding Christmas has long appeared Providential to me. A few years ago, the director at a Cleveland Orchestra Christmas concert remarked that more music had been written for Christmas than any other occasion. The reason for this, I believe, is that Christmas celebrates something (really Someone) real, and that reality is attractive even to many who do not believe in Christ. At the very least, the fact that non-Christians enjoy parts of Christmas and indeed have contributed to its celebration is a reflection of the richness of Western civilization, and also represents an opportunity to help restore our culture to sanity.
Whenever I think of the beauty of Christmas, I think of my father's late brother, who was among those who helped instill in me a love for Christmas. A fan of Dickens, he used to quote from memory long portions of A Christmas Carol, and helped me to come to love Dickens' masterpiece. He also used to play his cello for us on Christmas Eve, introduced me to the great English choirs and their performances of Christmas carols, and made wonderful Christmas decorations for my grandparents' house, including large golden angels and elaborate paper ornaments for the tree. My uncle did not go to church for most of his adult life, but he never lost his love for Christmas, and that love helped preserve a tie to the Church that helped my uncle return to Her before the end. Christmas has been an occasion of grace for many, and mostly scandalizes those looking for a reason to be scandalized.
Yes, there are tacky Christmas songs and tacky Christmas decorations, but even many of these are an attempt to convey something positive, if only jollity. Yes, people spend too much money at the stores at Christmas, but many Christmas purchases represent generosity, not "consumerism," and Christmas also marks the time when people give the most to charities and think most of helping others. Yes, the American Christmas does not coincide with the liturgical calendar, but neither does any other aspect of American life, and I do not regret the Christmas concerts and parties I have attended before December 24, much less think that I should be indifferent to their suppression because they come while my Church is observing Advent. As long as we insist that what we celebrate is Christmas, the nice aspects of the holiday will predominate. When everyone celebrated Christmas, not "holiday," even retailers felt the need to try and create something special, as those of us with warm memories of visiting downtown department stores in their heyday can attest. We have a long way to go in restoring Christmas to what it once was in this country, but we have made great progress since people came to realize that there is indeed a War Against Christmas and began resisting. This is a fight worth fighting and a fight worth winning.
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Thank you, George, for the promotion.
My remarks on historical consciousness were a very limited attempt to offer one answer to the question, "Why?" Lukacs, in connecting his relative preference for Christmas to being bourgeois, is in fact bringing historical consciousness into the discussion. (And, as I mentioned, his earlier passage about the Incarnation points the way toward the proper understanding of historical consciousness.) We have to remember that, for Lukacs, "bourgeois" is not an economic classification but a cultural one, and part of what makes the bourgeois bourgeois (in his understanding) is a deepened and deepening historical consciousness.
That the rise of cultural celebrations of Christmas in the West occurs in the late Middle Ages, alongside the early development of modern historical consciousness, seems to lend some credence to this admittedly limited answer.
By the way, regarding the question of liturgical ranking of the feasts, on this Fourth Sunday of Advent, Father Bovee had a very good sermon on finding Easter in Christmas. Two points in particular—one so obvious that it's easy to overlook, the other less so—stand out: Christmas is indeed a Mass, and so by its very nature not only points us to Christ's sacrifice on the cross but makes that sacrifice present again to us in our very celebration of His birth; and the prayers for the Christmas Masses explicitly invoke both the sacrifice of Good Friday and the Resurrection.
As we celebrate His First Advent - His Incarnation, including the Annunciation and His birth and those things which come with it up to and including His Passion, His Death, His Resurrection and His Ascension - we look forward in hope to His Second Advent (no dispensationalism or rapture). We are assured and reassured by the fact the the prophesies accurately foretold His First Advent; and so is our faith in the Second strengthened.
Thus, we live between the Advents, doing our duty to be the light in a dark world and salt among decaying men, prolonging the day of Grace so that He in His providence adds to His Church such that must be saved.
Today, our morning service centered on a Cantata in which Christ was lifted up in song, in scene and in narration. It began at the Annunciation and brought us to the Cross.
In Sunday school we are studying the Book of Ruth. Elimelech leaves Bethlehem, the House of Bread, which appears to have no bread and is in a state of famine and takes his family to Moab where he and his sons ultimately find only death, placing his wife and daughters-in-law in dire circumstances. Naomi gets word, however, that there is again bread in Bethlehem and returns with Ruth.
Into the spiritually breadless world came to Bethlehem The Bread of Life. Life-giving Bread again returned to Bethlehem; and like Naomi we reject the "mara" of the world and return spiritually, if not phycially, to Bethlehem each year.
Christmas is, among other things, the rejection of the world's "mara" and returning to Him who is The Gracious One and who is Our Delight.
Scott and MR. Robert Peters,
Your excellent posts reminds me of the French tradition of giving first communicants a complete set of Dom Gueranger's, The Liturgical Year. They are back in print in the US and every Christian household should have one on their bookshelf --- and perhaps even read at certain times of the year, like Advent and Christmas. Thank you gentlemen for your ever fresh recollections of some of the permanent things.
Would someone please send a link to Frederick Wilhelmson's essay, A Remaining Christmas, that was written back in the 1960's. I know it must be out on the internet somewhere but I have been looking for too long and cannot find it. It will be much appreciated.
Dear Robert,
Are you referring to Christmas in Christendom?
In a seemingly unrelated matter that is related in my mind, we have more evidence that Shakespeare may have been a secret Catholic: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article6964480.ece
A few years ago, at the end of the 20th century, I had someone whose name most of you know pontificate to me that any discussion of the importance of Celtic cultural heritage to the South was as big a fool's errand as fancying that Shakespeare was Catholic.
Amazing how people can tell the truth that they intend to deny, aint it?
If ideas do have consequences, then the consequences of the idea of Modern English culture (which was born of the two English Reformations and featured a rediscovery of the idea of Anglo-Saxon as defining and preferred to the point of being the new chosen race) include what WASP culture is and nurtures and wars against. The war against Christmas is inherent in the ideas of WASP culture.
Newman's analysis of the development of doctrines has its flip side, as he seemed well aware: there are inherent developments within WASP culture, each one worsening the whole. We are living them.
@56 Harry Wisniewski on 21 December 2009:
Dear Robert,
Are you referring to Christmas in Christendom
YES!!! That is it!!!
Robert, This is not what you requested but may be along the same line: by Wilhelmsen in This Rock Dec 91: Christmas Is.
http://www.catholic.com/thisrock/1991/9112fea2.asp
Thank you, Jim. Have a Merry Christmas.