The Thursday Review: On Winning the War on Christmas

first published January 7, 2011

I've been thinking a lot this year about the War on Christmas. Apparently a secular campaign has been raging for almost a decade now against religious traditions that Christians hold dear (like greeting one another with a decisive "Merry Christ-mas" (while wassailing, of course, with figgy puddings and jingling sleigh bells among the leaves so green)). As a way of describing the increasing secularization of the winter holiday season, conservative American media personalities like Bill O'Riley and Peter Brimelow first popularized the the term "War on Christmas" around the turn of the new millennium. I'm always the last to know. Until recently, I had been living like a Yule-tide Switzerland, blissfully neutral to the whole conflict, but the war on Christmas became a specially poignant issue to me this year, in part because it kept coming up on the blogs I was reading through Christmas (see especially here).

Tactics in the War on Christmas include: infiltration of our traditional password protocol by replacing "Merry Christmas" with the insidiously innocuous "Happy Holidays," trade embargoes on traditional carols in schools, and guerrilla attacks on creches in public places.

But these things aren't especially why "The War on Christmas" was on my mind this Holiday (read: Christmas) Season. It's a parallel issue that I've been wrestling with-- and this one seriously wrestling with-- the gross commercialization of Christmas.

I'm not sure if it was because a) I watched the (very flawed) film What Would Jesus Buy at the start of Advent this year, or if it's because b) I'm still working through some issues about what it means to be a pastor at Christmas time, or if it's because c) the commercialization of Christmas really has gotten grosser than ever... but it sure seemed like answer "c" to me this year. My wrestling has to do with this question: Do we really honour Christ's name best by associating it so closely with this frenzied celebration of stuff? Like I prayed in a prayer at church one Sunday morning: it seems almost silly for us to say: Jesus is the Reason for the Season. The one who came to give us divine simplicity, pure generosity and holy rest; is he the reason for all of this hectic buying and getting and rushing around?

I don't have easy answers to these questions, except to confess that they were heavier on my heart this year than ever before. At its heaviest, the question hit me like this: Do we crucify Christ every Christmas, when we throw ourselves a hedonistic winter bacchanalia, and then justify it by glossing it with his name?

And the moment that question hit me, I thought of the War on Christmas.

And I thought: how like the God of the Crucified Jesus would it be, if he won the War on Christmas by losing it absolutely and altogether? Because if we really did reach a time when Christ's name was no longer associated with the market economy's year end projections-- if there really did come a day when the last vestiges of its Christian trappings were stripped away from the fundamentally pagan celebration of consumption that happens every December-- if the Holiday Season really did banish the Christ from the party we once held in his honour, for good--

Well: what freedom to really celebrate the "Reason for the Season" might we discover then, stepping glorious out of the empty tomb of all our "Merry Christmases"?