By now I think it’s pretty well known that Christmas, as a holiday, was really grafted onto winter solstice, and Saturnalia, and the old Germanic Yule celebrations.
In fact, the only people who ever banned Christmas in America was the Puritans.
Yup, the Puritans.
I guess Christmas wasn’t pure enough for them.
We haven’t gotten too much of the War on Christmas hysteria this year. Maybe Fox News is too busy defending themselves from defamation claims that could take quite the financial bite out of their operation. We haven’t had too much discussion of whether either Jesus (a historical figure) or Santa Clause (a fantasy figure) are white, or some other color.
For the “War on Christmas” zealots that are still out there, fighting their latest skirmish in the culture wars, I’ll just point out that there is no way that any American could escape Christmas, even if they wanted to. Christmas is everywhere, in every store, in every restaurant, on television, even on the Internet. If you work in a retail establishment, from Thanksgiving through New Years, you have to hear a never-ending parade of Carols and other sappy Christmas ditties, until your brain is ready to fall out of your head.
No, what the War on Christmas is really about is not having to share equal billing with other, “un-American” religions, like Judaism, or Islam, or Hinduism, or Buddhism. To be fair, each of those religions only has a few percentage point adherents in the United States, compared to the approximately 40% protestants, 21% catholics, and 2% mormons, as well as the 29% or so that are religiously “unaffiliated.”
So why do these poor bastards have to say “happy holidays” instead of “merry Christmas” when the majority of Americans are some kind of religious affiliation?
Maybe just out of respect.
Maybe to just acknowledge that there are people here who are not Christian.
I mean, it doesn’t really matter, because no matter what religion you are, you can’t escape the wall-to-wall coverage of Christianity in the month of December anyways.
So just chill War on Christmas zealots. As long as we have retail establishments, we will always have Christmas. All month long. From Thanksgiving to New Years, at the very least.
