Like the White Queen, President Trump regularly demonstrates the ability to think, or at least tweet, six impossible things before breakfast. Many of these falsehoods the deceiver-in-chief makes up himself, but he also runs a cottage industry in retweeting the fabrications of his favorite fake news sources, like Breitbart and Fox.
In a classic recent address rich with cognitive dissonance, the most obviously irreligious president in history told the evangelical Values Voter Summit that his administration was “returning moral clarity” to the White House and putting an end to “attacks on Judeo-Christian values.”
Presumably that means Trump is now against bearing false witness, committing adultery and coveting his neighbor’s whatever. We await his turning the other cheek and beginning to celebrate the meek and merciful as blessed.
The big applause line for the Values Voters was that perennial favorite, a promise to take sides in the War Against Christmas. No more political correctness for Trump. He promised we would all begin saying “Merry Christmas” again. That should teach those heathens a thing or two.
The fictional War against Christmas has long been a favorite trope of conservative bloviators like moral paragon and serial sex molester Bill O’Reilly, but it has a longer pedigree than that. One progenitor was evangelical rabble-rouser Gerald L. K. Smith, who began the Neo-Nazi, anti-semitic “America First Party” in 1944, went on to be a holocaust denier, and claimed those abbreviating Christmas as Xmas were trying to ex Christ out of the holiday.
Clearly, this is all nonsense. Or nostalgia for the conformist 1950s when those with other beliefs were considered unAmerican and non-Christians faced discrimination. Historically, however, Christmas was actually a minor church holiday, Epiphany and Easter being far more important.
The secular frivolity of Old English Christmas celebrations, including feasting, card playing, dancing and singing, were thought to be “a menace to the pure Christian spirit” by New England Puritans. Indeed, any special days on the calendar smacked of popery, and in 1659 they imposed a fine on anyone caught “observing, by abstinence from labor, feasting of any other way, such days as Christmas.”
American Christmas celebrations continued to be very low-key for another two hundred years, though German and Scandinavian immigrants did bring ancient trappings with pagan roots like Christmas trees to the holiday. In fact, Christmas as we know it did not really begin until the boom times after the Civil War when it became what Daniel J. Boorstin describes as a characteristic American innovation — a festival of consumption. (See his “The Americans: The Democratic Experience.”)
Santa, as a jolly old elf bearing gifts, was popularized by Washington Irving and Clement Moore in the early 1800s, though he had roots in Dutch and German folklore. But his appearance was solidified by illustrator Thomas Nast in 1863, Macy’s began the practice of decorating Christmas windows in 1874, and the Christmas card was pioneered in 1875.
Woolworth began stocking Christmas ornaments in the 1880s and giving Christmas bonuses in 1899, to prevent strikes or absenteeism during the busiest retail season of the year. The President first lit a ceremonial national Christmas tree in 1923, and by the mid-20th Century most of the largely secular holiday songs we still sing were being created. In the 1950s banks promoted Christmas Club savings accounts to encourage year long amassing of money to spend on the annual Christmas shopping blowout.
It was not anti-Christian liberals who objected to taxpayer funded Christmas celebrations on the town square or in public schools but defenders of the separation of church and state and the ban on an establishment of religion enshrined in the First Amendment. Courts agreed. If there was any political correctness beyond that, it came from elementary schools trying to protect children of other faiths from being made to feel excluded or alien due to inescapably Christian celebrations.
The weird terror of Christians who feel under attack if other faiths are tolerated is hardly justified by the life of the nation. Steeples are everywhere. You can tune in to preachers day and night. Twenty-five million Bibles were sold in the United states last year, and a dozen translations and centuries of commentary can be accessed instantly on line. Christmas is also hardly in decline, indeed it has spread from a day to 12 Days to a season beginning early in November and running through January. According to Pew Research, 71 percent of Americans identify as Christian, 23% say they have no religion and only 6% belong to non-Christian religions.
No, the real secularizers of Christmas are now, and always have been, the capitalists. There has always been minimal profit in faith in the infant Jesus, but a Niagara of money in the fat, old pagan elf in his magic sleigh laden with loot to be placed under the tree, in Black Friday and Cyber Monday and in post-Christmas Sales for bargain hunters.
And as the country has gotten increasingly diverse and secular, the hucksters have been loath to lose a single nickel in Christmas spending from Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Zoroastrians, atheists or agnostics. So why risk offending their faith or lack or it? Thus, Happy Holidays and Season’s Greetings have seemed safer salutations or sentiments to express in store decorations or on Starbucks cups.
The war wasn’t against Christmas, it was in favor of maximizing profits. And surely Trump has a lot more in common with this merchandizing mindset than with the sectarian purity of the Values Voters. War on Christmas? We can’t get enough of it. Ho,ho,ho.