There was a war on Christmas
Christmas lost
Happy New Year. I hope your Chrismastide was as joyous as my own.
But as happy as the screams and laughter of the kids were, my own thoughts were, as ever, darkened by discourse. Since reading it a few weeks ago, I’ve been ruminating and reflecting on Drunk Wisconsin’s essay Christmas is a secular holiday. His thesis is that Christmas’s religious origins are now mere historical curiosity, and that the actual holiday, as celebrated by actual Westerners, is completely secular. Consider the extreme outsider view:
An alien lands in the middle of the US in December and starts learning about Christmas. Superficially, Christmas is about lights hung on the outside of single family homes, Christmas trees decorated with ornaments, and wreaths hung on doors. It’s about familiar Christmas music getting played on repeat and Christmas movie marathons at night. It’s about buying presents for your loved ones, particularly kids. There’s deep lore behind common Christmas characters: Santa Claus delivers presents to kids on Christmas night by landing his reindeer-pulled magical sleigh on their roof and coming down the chimney, his lead reindeer is a bully victim named Rudolph with a glowing red nose, he lives at the North Pole and has elves help him make toys all year long, he keeps a list of naughty and nice kids, and sometimes his wife makes an appearance, particularly when it’s a movie about his origins.
Once you get past that surface-level stuff, Christmas is really about cozy winter vibes and curling up in front of a fire place with a mug of hot cocoa, even if the fireplace is on your TV. It’s about nostalgia for the Christmases of your youth, listening to the same songs that have been played for generations, and watching comforting movies with a joyous moral message. It’s about family, about parents and grandparents watching the sparkle of youthful naivety in their kids’ eyes as they see the presents Santa left them under the tree on Christmas morning. It’s about embodying a Christmas spirit, about Christmas magic, about something that extends beyond the physical and feeds the soul.
Having learned all of that, I would say the alien understands Christmas. If he is a particularly thorough student, he might dive into the origins of this holiday and may be surprised to find out that Christmas is a specifically Christian religious holiday. It turns out that this holiday isn’t about coniferous trees or presents or Santa at all; it’s about the birth of Jesus Christ, the god-messiah of the Christian faith. It turns out that none of the stuff he learned about is relevant to Christianity at all, and that no official Christian church requires its members to decorate their houses in lights or set up a tree or pretend reindeer can fly. Only having learned this does he look back and admit that there are some religious elements peeking through here and there in all of that consumed Christmas content.
The typical American who celebrates Christmas, even if they are Christians who attend church on occasion, do not primarily celebrate the birth of our savior. They celebrate a secular mythos of Santa and reindeer, of family togetherness, of gifts and generosity. Jesus may make an appearance, but he’s a footnote, not the main show.
Of course this observation is nothing new. Devout Christians have been complaining about the secularization of the holiday for so long that it was already a punchline in the early 90s, in the Dana Carvey era of SNL.
That battle having been conclusively lost, the religious right retreated to a much weaker grievance, which itself has been so widely lampooned that it too mostly serves as a punchline among bien pensants: that there’s a “War on Christmas”, a distributed campaign of erasing public celebration of Christmas in favor of a generic “holiday season.” Usually people grinding this axe will point to examples in commerce and media, whether that’s Starbucks printing a different message on their seasonal merchandise, or the local news affiliate dropping traditional coverage of Christmas celebrations such as tree-lightings. Governments have additional reasons to tread lightly here given the capricious nature of first-amendment litigation, which is why public schools now grant a Winter Break and nativity scenes on government property are rare. There are too many examples to point to individually, and it’s easy for casual observers to convince themselves that public, communal celebrations of Christmas are in steep decline, even if far from extinct. The Christian faith and the Christmas holiday in particular are no longer ubiquitous, near-universally shared cultural assumptions, as they were even a few decades ago.
The War on Christmas is a frustrating front in the culture war. It’s at once obviously, undeniably taking place, but prosecuted in such a way that responsibility is murky and diffuse, no one in particular to blame. It’s also clearly not the case that public celebration of Christmas, by private actors, has been in any way meaningfully curtailed or outlawed — you can tell your coworkers and neighbors Merry Christmas, you won’t get fired or sued.
And yet. There clearly was a War on Christmas, and Christmas lost. People complaining about what people write on their end-of-year holiday cards or on their coffee cups are fighting a war that was conclusively decided decades ago, and most haven’t seriously reflected on this fact. The Christmas they seek to save, the second-most important religious holiday for what remains a massive majority of Americans, has already been strip-mined of religious significance in popular culture, its meaning hollowed out, its celebration crassly commercialized. The war is over. Christmas lost.
