For four decades in the middle of the 17th century, Americans experimented with outlawing the celebration of Christmas. In the rare cases when we've looked back on that time at all, it's as a curiosity, worthy of ridicule or puzzlement.
The time has come to take another look, and consider banning Christmas again.
+ + +
The War on Christmas is an annual tradition, but alas, only in the minds of Fox News personalities and viewers, for whom it consists of people saying "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas," complaints about nativity scenes on public property, and—last year, anyway—debates over Santa's racial profile:
Dave Mantel hashed out the racial issue in a piece here on In Progress last year, but we sadly neglected the larger issue of the War on Christmas itself. But no longer!
The idea that Christmas is under attack because people are saying "Happy Holidays" or (God forbid) writing "Xmas" instead of "Christmas" is nakedly, obscenely ridiculous, akin to the idea that "diversity = white genocide"1 in its breathtakingly offensive logical leaping. This does not mean that there shouldn't be a War on Christmas, however, as Jezebel staff writer Kelly Faircloth has pointed out:
Christmas has overflowed its traditional borders, annexed Thanksgiving, and begun laying siege to Halloween. You know what? Let's do it. Let's declare war on Christmas. Let's take up arms against this bloated, exhausting, consumerist nightmare. The end of the year is starting to look like the last thirty minutes of Akira. Christmas is the aggressor here, and Christmas must be stopped...Yes, Christmas has gobbled up the preceding four-plus weeks, a period once known and loved as Advent, now unmourned and forgotten by all but a few solitary souls. All this would be bad enough, but for me, the straw that’s breaking the nativity camel's back is the ungodly monstrosity that is Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas.2
The minute we cleared Halloween, the trailer for Grumpy Cat's Christmas movie dropped. Elf was already showing on cable this weekend. Dunkin' Donuts just announced its artery-hardening, teeth-rotting lineup of Christmas beverages. (Including a snickerdoodle and sugar cookie latte!) They were beaten to the punch by Starbucks, who announced the advent of their chestnut praline latte the week before Halloween. Around the country, the New York Times reports, radio stations devoted to 24/7 Christmas are activating like ill-natured seasonal cyborgs. Even as Halloween revelers are slinking back home in batter costumes on the first morning of November, stores are busting out bells and bows and boughs. Photographic evidence available here! The switch is carefully documented by local news outlets, thereby feeding the frenzy. (Of course the Neiman Marcus holiday catalog arrives in early October, because you gotta get your orders in early if you want a $65,000 floral peacock sculpture.) And make no mistake—retailers are already trying to start the party in September.
The history of the evangelical Christian movie is long and tedious history, best left unexamined if one is to retain any shred of faith in humanity, but the last few years have seen a surge in the budget and reach of Christian movie making, with movies like Heaven Is for Real and God’s Not Dead attracting widespread attention and unprecedented amounts of money. It goes without saying that these films are abysmal, but quality is beside the point. They are about shoring up the faith of people who already believe in something, which is essentially the opposite purpose of anything that can be called art.
That Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas is not art is beyond dispute: not only has it been universally reviled among film critics as utter trash, it also currently holds the highest rank on IMDB’s list of the worst-rated movies of all time. What is most offensive about it is not its art-free character, but its screeching defense of the material and cultural trappings around Christmas that have begun to make it unbearable.
The cherry on top is Cameron's defense of materialism itself, made in a recent Q&A about the film:
"Materialism is actually a fascinating concept. The eternal God took on a material body, something we can touch and see. That's a miracle! And so it's right that our Christmas isn't just some religious idea in our heads and in our hearts that we think about and get goosebumps over. It should be able to download into the world in the form of things that we can look upon and touch with our hands. Like gifts for those who love us."As Kelly Faircloth put it, "Don't mind me, I'm just choking to death on some gingerbread cookies, watching Kirk Cameron defend materialism in the name of one of the world historical figures most famous for renouncing it."
If even Kirk Cameron, evangelical Christianity's pop culture stalwart, cannot be called upon to recognize the crassness of Christmas, then surely any hope of reclaiming the holiday as a public good is lost. If Christmas is doomed, then, let it burn, that we might grow something fresh in the ashes.
+ + +
The Puritans banned Christmas because it was celebrated with a great deal of behavior they found unsavory. In the words of one Puritan,
That more mischief is that time committed than in all the year besides, what masking and mumming, whereby robbery whoredom, murder and what not is committed? What dicing and carding, what eating and drinking, what banqueting and feasting is then used, more than in all the year besides, to the great dishonour of God and impoverishing of the realm.They also objected to it because there was no biblical reason for celebrating Jesus’ birth on December 25. The whole thing smacked of a pagan holiday dressed up as something else, which of course it essentially was.3
 |
| Taken with permission from David Malki!'s excellent webcomic, Wondermark |
While the laws against Christmas were lifted in 1680, they effectively killed the old way of celebrating Christmas, and the holiday did not start to become what it is today until Americans began celebrating it in earnest again after the Civil War.
It seems to me that we could use something similar in our current age. Let's ban the public celebration of Christmas and its associated trappings. If forty years of law were enough to keep Americans from publicly celebrating Christmas with mumming, dicing, and carding, forty more years should be enough to erase the memory of Grumpy Cat's movie, Elf, crappy holiday beverages, and, we can only pray, Kirk Cameron's Saving Christmas. People could still privately celebrate Christmas at home and at church if they chose, but the incessant public spectacle and strain would be washed away in the cleansing legal tide. The holiday would return to its natural state: a single day of gentle joy, spent with a few friends and family members, surrounded on all sides not by months of crass clangor and consumption, but merely by the clean, quiet, cool winter air and a crisp dusting of snow.
1. A real, very racist idea that you will have to look up yourself, because I am certainly not linking to anything about it here.↩
2. Confession: I haven’t actually seen this. I’m comfortable citing others’ experiences, trusting that the man who made Left Behind: World at War will have had little trouble matching and exceeding his previous accomplishments in the desecration of cinema.↩
3. Though there are actually some fascinating theological reasons for using December 25 as Jesus’ birthday, quite outside of any association with/coopting of pagan holidays. ↩
