By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
Recently, I came across an exchange on Facebook over one of those “Keep Christ in Christmas” banners that you see around this time of year. The banner was not confrontational or politically partisan. It read, “I’m inviting all my Facebook family and friends to join me in returning to the traditional greeting of ‘Merry Christmas,’ instead of the politically correct ‘Happy Holidays!’ If you agree with me, please repost this message. ‘Merry Christmas.’ We need Christ in our lives.”
(I shouldn’t assume that readers of this column know what Facebook is all about. There is nothing wrong with not knowing. Family members of mine with master’s degrees are in that category. In basic terms, it is an Internet “social media” website where people can post pictures of themselves, events in their lives, and items of interest. ‘Facebook friends’ of theirs can then post comments about the material, initiating a conversation.)
What piqued my interest was one woman’s reaction to the banner. It read: “Oh, stop it! Nobody is stopping anyone from saying anything. We are overwhelmed by Christmas by September. The stores are loaded with Christmas decorations and assorted junk.”
I can’t read minds. I don’t this woman or her motivation. But there is something, well, shall we say, disingenuous about her reaction. She can’t possibly be unaware of what has been going on in the country since at least the 1960s. Obviously, no one is stopping anyone from saying, “Merry Christmas.” But it is dishonest to maintain that pressure is not being applied to limit when and where we say it.
We can’t treat this Facebook correspondent as one of a kind. It is now a routine tactic for people on the left to complain that Christians are “whining” and being overly sensitive about the “Happy Holiday” greeting.
Not so. There is nothing overly sensitive about our reaction. The woman on Facebook has to know that schools all over the country have routinely renamed the “Christmas holiday” the “Winter Break” on their calendars; that “Christmas assemblies” at those schools are now called “winter assemblies,” and that at those assemblies only songs such as Jingle Bells and Winter Wonderland are permitted. No more songs referring to Christmas, not even fully secularized ditties such as Have a Holly, Jolly Christmas, or Silver Bells.
America’s Christians can see these changes being made at the same time that their children’s schools are being closed for Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah and (in New York City) Muslim holidays. This woman has to be aware that the “Christmas decorations and assorted junk” that irk her are now advertised as part of “Holiday Sales” and “Seasonal Gifts.”
Perhaps you recall the stories a few years ago about major retailers ordering their employees to no longer say, “Merry Christmas” to customers, replacing it with “Happy Holiday.” Target was one of the stores mentioned in those stories. Snopes (snopes.com), the website that investigates to determine if stories such as this are true, looked into the charge. Snopes found the story not to be true; at least literally.
Snopes sent out a team of investigators to a local Target store one December. The investigators offered a “Merry Christmas” greeting to the employees they encountered. All the Target employees reciprocated with “Merry Christmas.”
Does this mean this story about Target’s policy was a hoax or a bout of hysteria? Not exactly. Snopes prides itself on being nonpartisan and objective. They probed further and found that “Target’s in-store, web, and printed promotional materials indicated that the discount chain was among the many retailers who began the 2005 holiday season by downplaying or eschewing use of the word ‘Christmas’ in favor of the less-specific word ‘Holiday’.”
Beyond that, the Snopes investigators didn’t find “any signage in our local Target that used the word ‘Christmas.’ All the promotional signs we saw carried the chain’s non-specific holiday slogans, such as ‘Savings for the Season’ or ‘Gather Round’ (even though the text of the latter was always printed in the traditional green-and-red colors of Christmas). Even the shelf tags identifying Christmas-specific products employed the phrase ‘Traditional Holiday’ rather than ‘Christmas’ — thus Christmas stockings were identified as ‘Traditional holiday stockings’ (as if there were some other traditional wintertime holiday celebrations that involved the use of stockings) and Christmas tree ornaments were described as ‘Traditional holiday ornaments’.”
It is obvious. Target’s employees did not need a formal directive from the company’s chief executive officer to get the message about the retail chain’s view of how Christmas was to be treated. I have been told that Target, in response to protests from customers, has changed its policy and now uses the word “Christmas” in quite a few of its ads and store displays.
I don’t know about the rest of the country, but in my area of Connecticut I see the same openness in recent years to store displays and advertisements with a specific reference to Christmas.
This is a welcome change. But the point is that there was, just a few years ago, a deliberate policy of downplaying the use of the word “Christmas.” The woman who criticized the Facebook posting was either curiously oblivious to what has been going on, or is seeking to mislead people. Moreover, even if Target has changed its policy, the effort to take Christ out of the “holiday season” continues in other parts of our lives. Witness what is going on in our schools and the prohibition against Christmas scenes on public grounds.
An argument can be made that America’s Christians should acquiesce to this pressure to make the Christmas season less overtly Christian — for Christian reasons, in fact. I get the point when people say we should think of non-Christian grade school children who feel left out when almost all their classmates are involved in Christmas festivities.
One way to counter this concern would be to suggest that non-Christian families deal with the Christmas season the way Christian families deal with the closing of schools for Jewish holidays. By and large, Christian families simply tell their kids, “Many teachers and students are Jewish so it makes sense for the school to recognize that fact.” No one gets psychic scars in that scenario.
Another way would be for us to take into account the feelings of our non-Christian neighbors when we call for keeping Christ in Christmas in public venues. We can do that. There is a difference between placing a manger scene front and center on the steps to city hall and one placed next to a gazebo on the village green; between a high school assembly where the school chorus sings Have a Holly, Jolly Christmas and one where it sings O Little Town of Bethlehem and its lyric “Christ the Savior is born.” Intelligent people of goodwill should be able to draw these lines.
What is unacceptable is demanding that Christians express their Christmas wishes to each other only in private, “behind closed doors,” if you will. Certain of the critics of public expressions of Christmas greetings give the impression that that is what they want.
An overstatement? I say no.
Think back to the time in 2013 when Ted Turner expressed disbelief when a number of his employees at Turner Broadcasting came to work with ashes on their forehead on Ash Wednesday. “What are you people? Jesus freaks?” he was heard to exclaim by many at the station. (Following a protest led by the Catholic League, Turner issued an apology.) The woman who complained on Facebook about “Christmas decorations and assorted junk” at the department stores around Christmas is reflecting a similar state of mind.
It does us no good to pretend otherwise.
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