What do the Jacobins, Soviets, Nazis, and Democrats have in common? All four breeds of ideologue have waged war against a common enemy: Christmas. The War on Christmas rages on in 2016, despite the belligerents’ persistent gaslighting. Not even the funny papers have escaped the crosshairs of the anti-Christmas crusaders: two weeks ago in Killeen, Texas, a middle school administrator was forced to remove decorations featuring Linus from A Charlie Brown Christmas out of fear that the display created “an issue of separation of church and state.” Three days before Christmas Eve, the phrase “Jesus never existed” trended on Twitter.
The War on Christmas is a centuries-old struggle, and ironically the earliest American Christians may have kicked off the conflict. In the 16th and 17th centuries, Puritans in England and New England passed laws forbidding the celebration of Christmas, which they considered to contain the “trappings of popery” and “rags of the beast.” But whereas the Puritans fought the holiday for not being Christian enough, four major groups have attacked Christmas precisely because it is Christian.
The Jacobins banned Christmas outright after the French Revolution in 1789. In 1793, the new government instituted the Fete de la Raison to honor the Cult of Reason, renamed churches “temples of reason,” and de-christened Notre Dame. That same year, the Jacobin-controlled National Convention abandoned the Gregorian calendar for a new, Republican Calendar, which renamed Christmas “Dog Day.”
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Soviet communists also prohibited Christmas celebrations after the Russian Revolution of 1917. The red five-point star replaced the Bethlehem star, and Christmas trees were banned. In 1931 Stalin associate Lazar Kaganovich destroyed with dynamite the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, which had been commissioned on Christmas Day 1812 by Emperor Alexander I to consecrate the Russian victory over Napoleon to Christ. By the mid-1930s, the Soviet government relented somewhat and permitted some secularized Christmas celebrations, but all festivities were required to focus on New Year’s Day rather than Christmas.
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The Nazis too viewed Christmas as a threat to totalitarian rule, but rather than ban celebrations outright, they simply Nazified the holiday. Nazi propagandists promoted the pagan roots of Christmas traditions, particularly trees lit with candles, as essentially winter solstice rituals; the celebration of the incarnation transformed into a German nationalist festival for the Aryan race. Most importantly, Christ was de-emphasized when not removed from Christmas traditions altogether. Light and Germanness became the dominant Christmas themes, children were encouraged to fashion ornaments in the shape of swastikas and “Odin’s Sun Wheel,” and Christmas carols were rewritten as paeans to the German state.
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In the United States, the secular left has sought to de-emphasize public Christmas celebrations for decades. States and municipalities have traded Christmas trees for “holiday” trees. Retail outlets including Walmart, Target, Best Buy, and Gap have in recent years scrapped references to Christmas in favor of the secularized euphemism. Just last year, Starbucks discarded previous Christmastime decorations of carolers, tree lights, snowflakes, snowmen, and ornaments for a plain red cup. Even Frosty was too controversial for our skittish culture.
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The once ubiquitous seasonal greeting, merry Christmas, has virtually vanished from the lips of servers and retail workers, yet the aggressors insist that the cultural shift is nothing more than the paranoid fantasy of Bill O’Reilly. Their argument rests on a single premise: several holidays fall this time of year, so why not settle on a greeting that places Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and even New Year’s Eve–which arrives a week later and comprises entirely different celebrations and rituals–on equal footing with Christmas?
Both Hanukkah and Kwanzaa as observed in contemporary America developed as reactions and alternatives to Christmas. Hanukkah commemorates the rededication of the Second Temple in Jerusalem at the time of the Maccabean Revolt, and it has been celebrated since 139 BC. According to the Talmud, the Temple was purified following the Maccabean rebellion, and the wicks of the menorah burned miraculously for eight days with only enough sacred oil to last one day. Hanukkah has traditionally been considered a minor holiday relative to more sacred days like Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. But according to historian Dianne Ashton, beginning in the mid-19th century, Hanukkah’s proximity to Christmas, simplicity, and revolutionary, liberal themes led American reform rabbis, particularly two in Cincinnati, to transform the holiday into a grander celebration more akin to Christmas and distinctly American.
Kwanzaa first came into existed in 1966 as an “oppositional alternative to Christmas” for African-Americans to celebrate their African heritage, according to the holiday’s inventor, a California State Long Beach professor named Ronald Everett who later changed his name to Maulana Karenga. The word Kwanzaa derives from the phrase meaning “first fruits of the harvest” in Swahili, ironically an East African language despite the holiday’s focus on West African heritage. Just five years after creating the holiday, Karenga was convicted of felonious assault and false imprisonment for forcing two women to strip naked and torturing them with, among other instruments, an electrical cord and soldering iron. In the United States, an estimated half to two million people, or 0.16-0.63% of the population, continue to celebrate Kwanzaa in any form.
Nevertheless, anti-Christmas crusaders continue to deny the War on Christmas as the silly fantasy of the right wing even as they wage it. Who cares whether one wishes “merry Christmas,” “happy holidays,” or “season’s greetings”? What’s the difference? But Christmas commemorates the incarnation of the Divine Logos of the universe, the Word made flesh. It celebrates precisely how language matters.
