Merry Christmas — Perspectives

We’re getting near that beautiful Christmas season that people don’t talk about anymore,” said Donald Trump early in his first term. “They don’t use the word Christmas because it’s not politically correct. . . .Well, guess what? We’re saying Merry Christmas again.

Thank you very much, Sir, but I’ve been saying Merry Christmas for almost 80 years. Why do you feel the need to take credit for everything?

Twenty or so years ago, Bill O’Reilly warned us that “creeping secularism and pressure groups like the ACLU” had declared “War on Christmas” and were demanding that creches be removed from the public square. The right counterattacked with a vengeance. And here we are.

For many, this weaponization of Christmas has injected an unwanted level of anxiety into the holiday season. Do I say the politically correct but blandly meaningless “Happy Holidays” or the ethnically offensive but jolly “Merry Christmas?” What is a well-meaning fellow to do?

In truth, Christmas has been problematic since the beginning. Learning that three Maji had come from the East seeking the new king of the Jews, King Herod of Judea ordered the killing of all the young boys in Bethlehem just to be safe. Sixteen centuries later both the English Parliament (1647) and the Puritan city of Boston (1659) outlawed Christmas altogether, denouncing it as “popish.” These acts irritated the more fun-loving working classes, who were deprived of yet another holiday without their consent. France followed suit after its Revolution in 1789 and – in one of the earliest examples of wokeism – renamed the traditional “three kings cake” the “equality cake.”

I say Merry Christmas because that is the tradition in which I was raised. For most of this country’s history, Christianity has operated as a kind of state religion, whose power and pervasiveness have overwhelmed other faiths. It’s time to move on – or at least to read again the First Amendment, which begins: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Despite 235 years of litigation, those words still seem straightforward to me.

So when I say Merry Christmas to a Moslem or a Jew or an atheist, I’m not sticking my figurative thumb in their eye. I’m celebrating the season in my way, and I hope they will do the same to me. It’s no coincidence that many religions have important festivals at this time of year, when the darkest days of winter herald the coming light, when death foretells rebirth. Isn’t that what we are really celebrating on this earth at this time? And isn’t the diversity of those celebrations a reason for rejoicing?

Merry Christmas should be a greeting, not a weapon.

And so, as Fred said to his uncle Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol:

“But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time when it has come round, — not only its religious part, but everything else — as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow travelers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say yes to Christmas!”

“And so, as Tiny Tim said, 'A Merry Christmas to us all; God bless us, everyone!’”