Holiday Special

A traffic jam can be a lonely place without a radio to keep you company. So recently, I found myself listening to one conservative talk show host lamenting that the term "Christmas" would soon fade completely away as more people chose the adjective "holiday" to describe everything associated with the season. After all, when was the last time you were invited to a "Christmas" party rather than a "holiday" one?

This radio announcer placed the blame squarely on those liberal do-gooders pushing their agenda of political correctness. That answer sounds a little too simplistic to me, because it fails to account for the underlying complexities that characterize Christmas. For instance, Easter doesn't seem to face this same problem regarding the word "holiday" as a means to promote social sensitivity, despite its proximity to Passover.

Of course, celebrating Christ's resurrection has always been a day of religious observance within Christianity. Christmas has not. It took roughly four centuries before the Catholic Church established a Feast of Nativity on December 25 to recognize the birth of Jesus, and like any good enterprising organization, it took this step to undercut the competition.

The ancient pull of winter solstice celebrations, such as the Saturnalia and the birthday of the Persian god Mithra (which conveniently also fell on December 25), remained strong even among the newly converted. So, Church leaders did the next best thing—they co-opted the holiday period to help promote their own religious agenda. It still took centuries for Christmas to be accepted throughout the Christian world.

You can also argue that literary influences, rather than spiritual ones, have played a major role in defining the Christmas holiday at least in the United States. Religious conservatives originally banned it within colonial New England, because they did not want to spoil a perfectly good work day, but attitudes slowly changed in the early 19th century. First, Washington Irving published a popular series of stories chronicling the "good old days" of medieval Europe, in which pagan inspired frivolities were encouraged, as well as other Old World customs.

At around the same time, a classics scholar named Clement Clarke Moore (who may have been familiar with Irving's tales) jotted down a short poem to amuse his children, defining for the first time the modern image of the jolly old man in the red suit in A Visit From St. Nicholas.

In 1843, Charles Dickens delivered the coup de grace to the humbug still lingering in some puritan quarters, when he introduced Ebenezer Scrooge to the world. In his effort to thoroughly ridicule Scrooge, Dickens produced an enduring version of holiday spirit that perfectly reflected his Unitarian sensibilities.

"In the next 100 years, Americans built a Christmas tradition all their own that included pieces of many other customs, including decorating trees, sending holiday cards, and gift-giving," notes the History Channel web site. "Although most families quickly bought into the idea that they were celebrating Christmas how it had been done for centuries, Americans had really re-invented a holiday to fill the cultural needs of a growing nation."

Those cultural needs included a close association with beloved community traditions, such as Christmas parades or tree lighting ceremonies, which were often thinly disguised public relations activities by department stores to promote holiday shopping. As the Wall Street Journal recently reported, the decision by Federated Department Stores to rename a slew of recent acquisitions under the Macy brand has caused a bit of trepidation within cities worried that longstanding local Christmas activities will disappear along with their stores' hallowed local identities.

Princeton University religion professor Leigh Schmidt sees an unbreakable and longstanding connection between the spirtual and the economical, what he calls "the hybrid relationship between Christianity and the consumer culture--a relationship that was, by turns, symbiotic and conflictual, complementary and contested."

One of the best modern examples of this mixture between commerce and Christmas tradition occurred in 1939, when a copy writer for the Montgomery Ward store produced a children's tale about a misfit reindeer with a colorful nose just in time for the holiday season. It became a big hit. The store sold about two and a half million copies of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer to Christmas shoppers that year.

Ironically, two opposite forces have appeared with similar aims. Religious Christians want to put the "Christ back in Christmas," while some non-Christians simply want to be left alone. With his book, The Trouble With Christmas, Tom Flynn could be offering a fairly persuasive argument that all this attention on the "holiday" season is actually non-PC in nature, especially for those who don't celebrate any holidays in December and simply feel uncomfortable with the pressure to participate in festivities that feel alien to them.

Either way, Christmas boasts an amalgamation of universal themes that could fit comfortably in almost every belief system on the planet. As long as people enjoy the flexibity to define the season in ways that suit their own personal tastes and ethical sensibilities, Christmas will remain the most inclusive major religious holiday in the world.