Good column in the New York Times today...
Religious conservatives have a cause this holiday season: the commercialization of Christmas. They're for it.
The American Family Association is leading a boycott of Target for not using the words "Merry Christmas" in its advertising. (Target denies it has an anti-Merry-Christmas policy.) The Catholic League boycotted Wal-Mart in part over the way its Web site treated searches for "Christmas." Bill O'Reilly, the Fox anchor who last year started a "Christmas Under Siege" campaign, has a chart on his Web site of stores that use the phrase "Happy Holidays," along with a poll that asks, "Will you shop at stores that do not say 'Merry Christmas'?"
This campaign - which is being hyped on Fox and conservative talk radio - is an odd one. Christmas remains ubiquitous, and with its celebrators in control of the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court and every state supreme court and legislature, it hardly lacks for powerful supporters. There is also something perverse, when Christians are being jailed for discussing the Bible in Saudi Arabia and slaughtered in Sudan, about spending so much energy on stores that sell "holiday trees."
What is less obvious, though, is that Christmas's self-proclaimed defenders are rewriting the holiday's history. They claim that the "traditional" American Christmas is under attack by what John Gibson, another Fox anchor, calls "professional atheists" and "Christian haters." But America has a complicated history with Christmas, going back to the Puritans, who despised it. What the boycotters are doing is not defending America's Christmas traditions, but creating a new version of the holiday that fits a political agenda.
The Puritans considered Christmas un-Christian, and hoped to keep it out of America. They could not find Dec. 25 in the Bible, their sole source of religious guidance, and insisted that the date derived from Saturnalia, the Roman heathens' wintertime celebration. On their first Dec. 25 in the New World, in 1620, the Puritans worked on building projects and ostentatiously ignored the holiday. From 1659 to 1681 Massachusetts went further, making celebrating Christmas "by forbearing of labor, feasting or in any other way" a crime.
It's worth reading the whole thing.
I keep picturing Jerry Falwell and a small group of his holy goons walking into one of the box stores to strong-arm the store manager. As he turns to go, he says with a wink, "And while youse guys are at it, may I and my boys suggest that maybe an unfortunate accident should happen to the Chanukah decorations. 'The menorahs was tragically lost at sea on the way from the factory in China when the cargo container hit a storm... THE DREIDELS SLEEP WITH THE FISHES!'"
O.K., I'm sure that's not what Jerry Falwell actually does. Really.
Updated to add: Apparently the following exchange - which could have been taken straight from the pages of the Onion - actually took place on Bill O'Rellly's show the other day:
Rev. Tim Bumgardner: I think they should put a Nativity scene -- be American! Hey, celebrate Christmas -- people spend more money! Jesus makes people want to spend money!
O'Reilly: I agree. I'm with you.
Yeah.
