It’s time to give up the “war on Christmas.” It was lost a long time ago.
‘Tis the season — the season for snow, gift-giving, carols, family, big meals … and lawsuits.
Christmas-related lawsuits and complaints have become as reliable a tradition as any other. Already a couple has won a $75,000 lawsuit against their homeowners’ association who wanted them to take down their Christmas light display. A Nebraska principal banned all things Christmas at her school, even claiming that candy canes symbolize Jesus (they don’t). And I’m sure there’s more to come.
And it’s all part of the “War on Christmas,” supposedly. The narrative that’s been promoted for decades now is that Christmas is a Christ-celebrating holiday that once promoted Christ-centered values, but now an increasingly secular society wants to water it down and push it into the background, along with any public observance of religion. Some people, especially avowed atheists, it seems, are all too happy to participate in this war, ostensibly in order to defend the separation of church and state.
We modern Americans (and other Westerners) seem to have this vision of Christmas as being a long-standing traditional holiday of religious observance and family gatherings. The holiday does celebrate the birth of Christ, after all, and it’s been around forever. We tend to believe the narrative that only now is society more secular than ever, and Christmas is in real danger of being pushed out of public life. And it’s religiously observant, usually conservative Christians that tend to feel the need to fight the hardest for the holiday season.
The Puritan Pilgrims, the spiritual predecessors of many conservative Christian denominations today, would find this quite ironic, because they hated Christmas. You think the Grinch was bad? The Puritans not only canceled Christmas, but they made it illegal to celebrate it. Yes, Christmas was illegal in the Massachusetts colony until 1681.
But they didn’t just do it to be Grinch-like. Their reasoning for banning Christmas (in addition to it not being in the Bible) was because in the 1600s, Christmas was known for being a holiday of drunkenness and wild partying. They felt it was horrendously offensive to God to associate in any way with such a day. That’s how badly Christmas was perceived. And it remained taboo in some regions until the 19th century.
But since then, of course, Christmas has been revived. So what was it that revived it? It was no religious revival. Mostly, it was the commercialization. It was the Christmas trees, gift giving, and Santa Claus. And those have persisted as the defining features of Christmas to this day.
We say, “Put the Christ back in Christmas!” But the reality is: Never in American history has Christ been the defining feature of Christmas. During the colonial era, it was known for drunkenness and debauchery. During the modern era, it’s known for shopping and list-making. If we’re totally honest, even in the minds of the most devoted Christians among us, Christ is usually at best secondary or tertiary in everyone’s mind — including, admittedly, my own. According to the Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project, only 11% of Americans most looked forward to “religious reflection and church” on Christmas. That number, for a holiday whose very name comes from the words “Christ’s Mass.”
We complain about the commercialization of Christmas, but the commercialization of Christmas is the reason it’s such a popular holiday today and not still a holiday of drunken partying. Most of our Christmas carols are about snow, romance, and breakups. Our most popular Christmas movie is one centered around a kid getting his favorite toy gun. Even the good values we promote at Christmas aren’t usually linked to Christ and who he is, but a general concept of goodwill toward people.
Folks, if victory in the War on Christmas looks like Christ being the primary focus of the holiday, then the War on Christmas is lost. It was lost a long time ago, and was in fact lost before a single European set foot on this continent.
Christmas, for most people, is not a religious holiday that celebrates Christ. It’s a functionally secular holiday with Christian roots. In that regard, it’s just like Thanksgiving (originally intended to be a day of thanksgiving to God), Halloween (All Hallow’s Eve, prior to All Saints’ Day), Saint Valentine’s Day, Saint Patrick’s Day, and Easter (Christ’s resurrection). Really, even the word holiday comes from the words “holy day.”
This, by the way, is why it makes no sense for those on the other side of this War on Christmas to protest the presence of Christmas displays on public property. If you’re offended by the mere mention or show of Christmas and insist on replacing it with “winter” or “holiday,” you should also be offended by St. Patrick’s Day clovers, St. Valentine’s Day hearts (or the mere mention of those two holidays in schools!), and jack o’ lanterns — all symbols used to celebrate holidays with religious roots.
Don’t get me wrong in all this. I love Christmas. It’s my favorite holiday. I love most of the things the modern American Christmas stands for. Giving gifts, gathering with family, eating good food, and reveling in nostalgia are great things, and Christmas is the perfect incentive to do it. But let’s recognize it for what it is. We don’t really treat it like a religious holiday, so I don’t think we are really defending Christ by defending the traditional American Christmas.
So, in light of all this, can we “put the Christ back in Christmas?” Can a war that’s been lost for over 400 years be reignited and won?
Probably not the way we think. I don’t think we’ll ever make Christmas a holiday where the entire American public comes together for the specific purpose of revering Christ. I don’t think we should try. But we can make it so that the entire American public knows that it’s a holiday Christians set aside specifically to revere Christ.
There are some crazy, radical ways we could do this. We could, for example, celebrate Christmas for what it is, and set aside a different day specifically to celebrate Christ’s birth? It’s likely Jesus wasn’t born in winter anyway, so why celebrate it then? A lot of people like September as a more likely time period, possibly coinciding with the Feast of Tabernacles. Call it Incarnation Day or something. Set aside that time for devotion and prayer or a church event. If even one major church did this, maybe the idea would spread.
Or if we celebrated gift giving on St. Nicholas Day (December 6), in honor of the saint. Some places in Europe do it; we could too. That at least keeps the consumerism and materialism out of our homes on December 25.
However, those obviously aren’t the most realistic ideas, or the most effective. Despite its nature as a secular holiday, Christmas still has Christian roots. And we can appeal to those roots when we’re speaking with the world about the gospel. But how can we make sure we really communicate the gospel through Christmas, and not just old family tradition?
We explain to our families, and our church communities, why everything we do at Christmas. All these good values — family, charity, generosity — that have become associated with the holiday but detached from Christ, we need to reconnect them to Christ. We need to make sure that Christmas and Christ are really linked in our minds.
We don’t just give gifts because we’re supposed to; we give gifts because Jesus gave us everything we have, and we want to be like Jesus.
We don’t just see family because that’s what you do. We see family because God gave us our families.
We don’t just go to church because it’s tradition. We go to church to celebrate the birth of our God and our Brother with our siblings in Christ.
And we don’t just celebrate Jesus at Christmas. We remember that Jesus came down to earth and became like us, not so we would just talk about it, but in order to make us more like him. So we treat Christmas as a day to not just celebrate Jesus, but to be like Jesus.
The best thing we can do to win the War on Christmas is to change the way we think about Christmas. Our goal isn’t to take control of the entire society, but to take control of the way we perceive Christmas in our own hearts.
