I am of a conflicted mind when it comes to Christmas commercialization. Seasonal buying and selling fuels the economy and keeps Target and Wal-Mart out of Chapter 11. Our commercial Christmas supports a great number people who in good part owe their livelihoods to Christmas buying, not least the buying done by Christians.
So maybe Christians have a point in their peevish complaints when a store chain banishes “Christmas” from shop floors during the, um, annual Holiday-Winter-Solstice-and-Something-Else season. There is no major chain that has not experimented with finding that exact yet still elusive Christmas alternative. “Holiday” gets tossed around as a substitute, and in the United Kingdom somebody tried out Winterval, a “winter festival” twist.
Wal-Mart, Macy’s, Target, Best Buy, Home Depot, Sears, Old Navy, Gap and others have all dropped or announced plans to drop or—in stealth fashion—simply obscured the word “Christmas” in their advertising in past years. Macy’s and Sears backed down on plans to eliminate Christmas under threat of an American Family Association boycott in 2005, as did Target. Wal-Mart at some point tossed its “Holiday Shop” and went back to its previous “Christmas Shop.” Gap and Best Buy are holdouts and both, along with about twelve others, are on the AFA’s naughty list. In previous years the AFA put Gap under a two-month boycott (to no effect) and the Catholic League once placed Best Buy on a “Christmas Watch List.” (Best Buy offers “Holiday” gift cards this year; it’s not for me to say if this bears watching.)
Other stores have toyed with Christmas-Free Zones, and I can’t say I blame them. In this super-sensitized era of inoffensive tolerance, stores hardly know whom to offend least by keeping or dropping Christmas.
The Christmas War isn’t limited to store chains. California does not have an official state Christmas tree, for instance, but there is an official California State Holiday Tree. It looks suspiciously like the older sort, which may explain why two governors in succession, Schwarzenegger and Brown, both stubbornly called it a Christmas tree. A California fire department somewhere did a demonstration on avoiding fires due to the careless handling of “holiday trees.” (Anyone stuck with a Christmas tree that year was out of luck in fire prevention. Oh, there’s a statistic to investigate—the number of fires traced to Christmas trees vs. holiday trees.)
Tree dust-ups along with issues over whether schools may offer Christmas concerts or limit themselves to plain vanilla “winter concerts” touch on questions of church and state. The store wars, though, concentrate on whose commercial frenzy it is: Christ’s or someone else’s.
Both reflect the decline of Christendom. The culture is no longer reliably Christian; the state reflects the culture (and helps shape it); Christians suffer a loss of privilege. Too many of us regard that as an indignity. For a number of reasons I’m not bothered. I won’t go into it here except to note we Christians must learn again how to engage the third century.
Agitation by Christian activist groups generally has the goal of “keeping Christ in Christmas” so everyone so will remember that “Jesus is the reason for the season.” Is there anything wrong with that?
Yes. Christian aggressiveness over Christmas is embarrassing.
Who cares, first, if Best Buy or Gap “keeps” Christmas as a feature of their annual sales hustle? Hearing What Child is This? dispensed from overhead Muzak speakers as shoppers sort through Black Friday discards isn’t exactly the proclamatory moment St. Luke may have had in mind when he wrote his gospel.
Besides, the Christian proclamation of Christmas doesn’t belong to Gap, but to the Church of Christ. The culture may yet be residually Christian in some respects, but that hardly matters when it’s time to go shopping.
Yet somehow, as the AFA and the Catholic League would have it, making sure Wal-Mart features a Nativity Scene under a Christmas tree is a defense of Christianity. If this is how Christian apologists seek to defend Christmas, trust me, they’ve already lost the war.
There is a second reason. “Always,” noted St. Peter, “be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander” (1 Peter 3:15-16).
If the AFA and the Catholic League and others (for this behavior is by no means limited to those two organizations), could concentrate more on “gentleness and respect” while accounting for our hope in Christ maybe they would not look so Grinch-like, threatening store clerks with boycotts and loss of income.
Maybe we Christians ourselves should stop calling Christmas “Christmas” and revert to an older eleventh century phrase, Cristes Maesse—Christ’s Mass. Best Buy can fend for itself.
Russell E. Saltzman is an online homilist for Christian Leadership Center at the University of Mary, and author of The Pastor’s Page and Other Small Essays. His previous On the Square articles can be found here.
RESOURCES
Sears and Macy’s 2005 Christmas boycott
AFA’s 2011 Naughty and Nice Christmas list
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Comments:
"I won’t go into it here except to note we Christians must learn again how to engage the third millennium."
Otherwise, spot on.
Thank you for this comment.
Personally, I prefer to keep a nice Advent, to shop in controlled situations online, and avoid store appearances as much as possible.
That is why Hogmanay, or New Year's day became such an important festival - It had no religious connotations and the Kirk could not object to a purely secular festival
We still close for one day at Christmas, but two at New Year, hence the name, "a three-day blind," with the festivities commencing on New Year's Eve
What is your strategy? Online shopping or do you have another secret while giving your friends and family gifts?
Don't engage it as it you are the majority. That somehow, because 90% or so of the people are at least nominally Christian, it will rub off and people will "get it." No, act like the faith is the only thing keeping your small band of believers together.
This is what B16 means when the church of tomorrow will probably be smaller and holier.
Furthermore, it's pretty clear we're headed to 3rd century status. Catholics get in trouble with the emperor because they won't offer incense in the Roman temples. Catholics get in trouble with the emperor because they won't offer or pay for abortion, abortifacient drug coverage, etc. Within 10 years, that list will include euthanasia.
First things first: Where in the Bible are we instructed to celebrate annual birthdays? The only annual birthdays mentioned were kept by Pharaoh, and Herod, who celebrations included killing someone they kept in prison, like John the baptist. Where does it tell us in the Bible to celebrate Christs birth? or give us a date to observe? Didn't Christ tell us to keep Passover(the date of His crucifixion) in Remembrance of Him? Why is that date, the most mentioned throughout the Bible nearly ignored?
Cheers,
tom-in-the-UK.
It's true that the commercial version of Christmas is not really Christ's Mass. On the other hand, we do have a tradition of public celebration of the holiday which commemorates the birth of Christ. Historicizing references to Puritans, or to other countries which do (or did) not recognize Christmas are besides this fact. So as we whitewash the name "Christmas" from the holiday we publicly celebrate, we are only erasing another vestige of the particular and religious character of our own, already existing, traditions.
Every Year for the past 1800 or so, we celebrate the coming of our Lord and Savior, Gesu Bambino; at least we Catholics have and do. He is always new and His birth is always exciting. Protestants may be double-minded in that regard, but what do you expect from people who claim to be biblically oriented and yet ignore the clear teaching of the Bible on which Church is Gesu's Church? (Hint: it is the very visible and universal church founded in the First Century AD that celebrates teh Mass of Christ from which Christmas gets its name).
We don't need to wring our hands about the undoubted commercialization of Christmas. Gifts are an integral part of Christmas. I love giving Christmas presents and sharing the great love of family that the creche should inspire in anyone alive to life. One thing is for sure in all this, we should NEVER back down on the celebration.
Of course, I would never wish someone I know to be Jewish a Merry Christmas; I wish them Happy Hannukah instead. On the other hand, I expect the stores I shop in to wish me a Merry Christmas. Since the overwhelming majority of Americans do celebrate Christmas, the stores are going to have to recognize that we will be just as offended by their refusal to say "MC" as the much smaller number of non-Christians might if, Heaven forfend, the dread name of Christmas is uttered in their hearing. Sellers are rarely bashful about using Christmas in their ads (see for example the commercial Chevy is currently running with Santa Claus in a business suit on a showroom floor) and they try to make as much as they can out of the spirit of giving, so they need to call a spade a spade and Christmas Christmas. Buon Natale! Feliz Navidad! Bom Natal! Joyeux Noel! Merry Christmas!
A bit more appropriately, in the Chinese school where I teach there's a Christmas tree in the lobby, and the students today have been passing around gifts and wishing each other "sheng dan kwai le," "Merry Christmas." Moreover, I have had the joy of teaching Truman Capote's "A Christmas Memory" to 76 students over the past several weeks, and thus bearing witness to the Incarnation as found in this wonderful fictionalized account of Mr. Capote's childhood. There is a quiet and focus to this which is at once profound, delightful and winsome.
In a way, Christians should be thankful that major stores are doing away with the word "Christmas" in their displays and advertising, which have for years diluted and sophisticated the significance of Christmas. Put another way, their putting "Christmas" to rest may in fact resurrect its significance, if only through an unintended backdoor.
This Christmas I will tutor a student in the morning, have brunch, and then attend a late-afternoon Mass. In many ways, a day like any other, but truly a day unlike any other. All good.
"Seasonal buying and selling fuels the economy and keeps Target and Wal-Mart out of Chapter 11. Our commercial Christmas supports a great number people who in good part owe their livelihoods to Christmas buying, not least the buying done by Christians."
Isn't it obvious that there is something intrinsically perverse about an economic system of this nature? One that requires manipulative advertising to generate in people a sense of need for things they don't really need? One that wastes resources for the sake of sating these objectively non-existent needs? And so forth and so on....
The conflicted feeling that Rev. Saltzmann testifies to can be resolved, it seems to me, if this basic perversity is clearly recognized for what it is.
I find the substitution of "holiday" for "Christmas" to be annoying because it lacks truth. Sometimes I find it insulting----is "Christmas" such a bad word? Lately, however, I have seen the possibility raised by Peter---that inane and shallow
"holiday" displays and advertising might in fact revive the significance of true Christmas observance, "if only through an unintended backdoor".
But it is an ancient tradition that at Christmas time Christians stop nagging others about how stupid and ridiculous they are and just try to be cheerful and hopeful and encouraging. The idea is to act like you're happy and grateful for the Incarnation.
Of all the atrocities in the modern world, how important is it if a sales clerk wishes you a Happy Holiday? (It is a Holy Day, after all.) Don't we all have more useful things to do with our time just now than lecture secular people about their diction? Doesn't arguing about it and confronting people about it really just induce stress, elevate blood pressure and bring on that shaky too-much-adrenalin feeling?
Very few sinners will die unconverted because they never having heard a Christian rant about the grave error of referring to Christmas as a "holiday."
Thank you for your article as this whole craziness needs to be brought out in the open for all of us to address. This year I didn't care what I said, I said what I always say Merry Christmas and the response from the retail clerk was the same Merry Christmas because I believe in Christ and honor him.
I did make an error in 2010, I sent my cousin who is Jewish a Christmas card and she was offened. That's when I learned my lesson. Be aware as to who you may offened but be Christ like, knock and the door may be opened or shut; my mission is to knock. This year I sent a Happy Holiday card and I got a response and a request to connect. Be considerate of the belief of others, the Lord will tell you when opportunity knocks.
