Posted on 12/18/2005 6:12:52 AM PST by TexasCajun
FAUX FAUX FAUX
In a marketing ploy as plain as a mall full of Xboxes, a band of politicians, pundits and pastors is assailing those who dare to voice holiday cheer without the word "Christmas." These militants say seasonal greetings reflect the secular siege on a holiday that rightly belongs to Christians.
But the real war on Christmas was fought almost two centuries ago. Although the Rev. Jerry Falwell, television host John Gibson and the American Family Association might deny it, their side won. Christmas today is an inextricable part of U.S. public life, celebrated on TV specials, welcomed in public light displays and honored with a federal holiday.
No one is preventing Americans and U.S. companies from saying "Merry Christmas." Those who choose a more generic greeting do so voluntarily, in a spirit of inclusion that is in keeping with the Christmas message of peace and joy to all.
Despite this, Falwell has mobilized his congregation of 24,000 behind the Friend or Foe campaign, which vows to sue institutions that mistake the law on Christmas observance. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, an army of 8,000 activists are the crusade's "eyes and ears" in public schools, poised to report administrators who erroneously ban carols or keep teachers from saying Merry Christmas.
Gibson has written a book, The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought, that preposterously depicts Christmas as an endangered species. The American Family Association encourages people to boycott retailers that omit Christmas from their seasonal ads.
The AFA and the Catholic League even turned on President Bush, excoriating him for sending 1.4 million Americans an official White House card that says "Happy Holidays."
The whole manufactured controversy is bullying in spirit and false in its premise. In his exhaustively researched book The Battle for Christmas, historian Stephen Nissenbaum shows the real war on Christmas was waged by the Puritans — who thought it irreligious.
The winter solstice has been a time of celebration and observance for millennia, but before the 19th century, the only Europeans who observed Christmas were rowdy gangs who roamed about gorging, drinking and terrorizing the rich. The Puritans complained that the date adopted by the church, Dec. 25, was the date of the Roman feast of Saturn. Until 1681, Christmas was outlawed in the Massachusetts colony.
It was only in the 1820s that Victorian writers and Episcopalian merchants began to mold Christmas into its current form: a domestic tradition marked by genteel visits and gifts.
It took 50 more years for Christmas to be deemed a federal holiday in the United States.
Until recently, Christian leaders worried about the commercialization of Christmas. Some merchants were accused of using the birth of Christ as a marketing tool.
Falwell and his Christmas warriors ignore all of that. In their new scripture, commercializing the Nativity is proof of religious devotion. According to their faction, Christians — even the president — should not use inclusive words to share the glad tidings of peace on Earth, good will toward men.
Seeming to deny that Muslims, Jews and Hindus all celebrate winter festivals, the Christmas warriors have decreed that the season and its meaning belong to no one but them. They are mistaken and fail to reflect the true spirit of the holy day they want everyone to observe.
Merry Christmas Everyone -- There is only one reason for the season and it ain't some made up reason from an incarcerated felon.
I hope they get a lot of calls on this even though it wouldn't matter.
The Slimes of the South indeed. Nothing less from RAT Jackson-Lee country.
Leni
"No one is preventing Americans and U.S. companies from saying "Merry Christmas." Those who choose a more generic greeting do so voluntarily, in a spirit of inclusion that is in keeping with the Christmas message of peace and joy to all."
Yes, there are those that are doing this exact thing. And this voluntary thing you mention is a crock.
These people want to destroy what America stands for. They want to slowly weaken us until there is no America as we know it.
Uh, how about THEY fail to understand (it's ok, them not being Christian and all...) that we don't care if EVERYONE observes. Sure we'd LIKE everyone to be with us in Heaven one day, but not FORCED through celebrating Christmas! LOL
All we care is that if someone is going to celebrate the season, and want our businesss by doing so, they don't try to put lipstick on a pig! Celebrate Christmas dammit. If you're too scared to do that, don't. But don't expect my business at your girlie man store!
The Houston Chronicle is known for it's Christian values...NOT.
No one is saying that you can't wish someone a "Happy Non-Descript Year-End Festival" if you want; the complaint is that companies and organizations are banning or avoiding the greeting 'Merry Christmas' to the exclusion of other greetings. The editors tip-toed nicely around this fact.
No. Just the one that falls on December 25 of each year. The one that used to have a name.
This article definitely demonstrates why the use of newsprint is declining.
I'd love to drop my subscription to this newspaper. However, how will I know what the left is up to if I do that? Besides, I get it at student subscription rate. What a sad day when its competition, the Houston Post, went out of business.
Moslems do not celebrate any winter festivals at all ~ they use a lunar calendar, and their two big holidays rotate backward through the solar year.
Such ignorance on the part of an editorial staff of any newspaper is inexcusable.
I have never heard of a major Muslim or Hindu Holiday around Chistmas. I think the author just made that up. Likewise, Hannukah is not a major holiday for Jews.
The fact remains, there is only one major religion which celebrates a major holiday in December and that is Christians celebrating Christmas.
Wishing Hindus and Muslims "Happy Holidays" is doing nothing more than reminding them they don't have one to celebrate during the Christmas season. It also shows them that you have no clue about their religion (actually its the liberals who have no clue).
Substituting generic, all-encompassing holiday greetings does nothing to celebrate or ackowledge minority cultures and only serves to water-down the majority culture.
My seasonal word of Christian contrareity: To Tell the Truth, Virginia...
Dan
Sounds like they're volunteering not to take a Christmas holiday, doesn't it?
Dan
Hannukah is a minor Jewish holiday given prominence only by it's proximity to Christmas.
Which became Houston's only daily by accepting the offer of former Houston Post publisher Dean Singleton to sell out his morning daily for a LOT of money........he later bragged to his fellow Harvard MBA's at an exclusive luncheon at The Houston Club that he had taken the Chron's publishers for about $50 million more than he'd actually have sold the paper for.
The Chronicle, as soon as the backroom deal was done, sent managers and security men into the Post's newsroom first thing in the morning and gave everybody 15 minutes to get out -- literally. They told the fired employees they could come back later for their personal effects, to retrieve them by appointment. The Chronicle's behavior was gloating and brutal -- and expensive for advertisers.
This was all reported in the raffish left-wing, countercultural Houston Press, a few days after it happened. The Press sent a reporter to cover Dean Singleton's gloatfest, which he accomplished by hiding out in the kitchen with the Mexican waitstaff and taking notes through the kitchen doors as the servers bustled in and out.
The former editor of the Post, Lynn Ashby, is still in newspapering, editing the local neighborhood weekly The Leader.
Since all that happened, the publisher of the Chron has brought in a new editor, Jeff Cohen, who has undertaken to move the Chronicle to the left -- and unabashedly so, as shown by remarks he made two years ago and reported in his own paper, at a farewell dinner for departing editorial-page editor Frank Michel, who was leaving to become a PR flack for Houston Mayor (and former chairman of the Texas Democratic Party) Bill White.
No, moron, they mean exactly the opposite! CHRISTMAS belongs to them. Muslims, Jews, and Hindus don't celebrate Christmas. They may have their own holidays, and they should be encouraged to extend whatever greetings are associated with their respective traditions. But Christmas is a Christian holiday, and Christians are fully justified in sharing THEIR tradition with the greeting "Merry Christmas." And let's be honest, this time of year isn't what it is because of Hannukah or Kwanzaa. While those are both holidays (one real, one fake), nobody goes out Kwanzaa shopping or attends the annual office Hannukah party.
That doesn't "deny" anyone anything!
Actually, no. He condemned Jesus without a conviction, basically. There was no offense under Roman law.
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