It seems like the Christmas season starts a little earlier each year. A couple years back I was shocked when Costco put out Christmas items the week after Halloween; now the Christmas decorations are on sale weeks before trick-or-treating. And this year, even the War on Christmas has come early.
Over the weekend, people started flipping out over the 2015 version of the Starbucks red cups. The gist of the story is that one of America’s great holiday traditions is the heralding of winter marked by Starbucks switching their paper cups from white to red. The red cups have little designs and/or greetings on them wishing people happy holidays, or merry Kwanza, or blessed be, or what have you. And Americans treasure these icons of salvation. But this year the commies who decided that Starbucks was both capable of repairing race relations and too good for the second amendment are trying to airbrush Jesus out of American culture by rendering the Christmas red cups devoid of any Christmas symbols whatsoever. The cups are just plain red, with a green Starbucks logo. And boy, are Christians pissed.
Like I said, that’s the story. Or at least that’s the story that you’ll get if you do a quick news search for “Starbucks red cups” today, and included will be network news segments and headlines such as “Red Cups Create Uproar” and “Starbucks Cups Have Some Evangelical Christians Seeing Red.”
Now, in general, I’m an aggressive, neocon interventionist when it comes to the War on Christmas. I’ve even edited a book about Christmas—it’s called The Christmas Virtues and you can pre-order it today!—in which the great Jonah Goldberg has a blockbuster chapter on this long, twilight struggle. But this “story” is ridiculous. What happened, so far as I can tell, is that a fellow named Josh Feuerstein (who may or may not be comedian Kevin James’ twin) posted a video on Facebook claiming to be outraged and that video was shared a bunch of times over the weekend which caused a bunch of reporters and producers who should know better to decide that this was a Real Story with Real Outrage.
It’s not.
First things first: Despite the company’s no-goodnik history, it seems unlikely that the design nerds at Starbucks thought they were striking a blow for pantheism by making this year’s red cups plain red. Read this long story on the red-cup design process from a couple years back and it seems much more likely that they came up with some elaborate conceit that goes something like this: The centrality of coffee to our world obviated the need for symbols. At the same time, the warmth of a matte red expresses the oneness with which we embrace coffee as the center of our day, our community, and our lives.
And second things second: Almost no one is actually “outraged” by the plain red cups. There is no “uproar.” Christians are facing a wholesale assault on religious freedom by the full force of the United States government. Howard Schultz putting out red cups without snowmen on them is kind of a nothingburger.
But I promised you that the war on Christmas had started, and indeed it has. Because the news accounts of the red-cup outrage talk about a twitter hashtag—#merrychristmasstarbucks—and if you go have a look you’ll see that what started as Feuerstein asking people to post pictures of themselves with red cups that say “Merry Christmas” has been taken over by trying to outdo on another in mocking the non-existent Christians who hadn’t actually been outraged. Cups that say “Hail Satan” and pictures of Feuerstein with a dick drawn on him. How clever. How droll.
This isn’t a big deal, obviously. It isn’t persecution; it doesn’t even rise to the level of inconvenience. But it is a reminder that the War on Christmas is not a myth. There are people who don’t like Christians and—hard as this is to imagine—there are even people out there who don’t like Christmas itself. And these people find pleasure in harassing the rest of us in whatever ways they can, big or small.
If you want to fight the War on Christmas—the real one, not the red-cup reenactment—go pre-order a copy of The Christmas Virtues today! In addition to Jonah’s tour de force, it features essays by Steve Hayes, Kirsten Powers, James Lileks, P. J. O’Rourke, Christopher Buckley, Mollie Hemingway, Sonny Bunch, Iowahawk, Heather Wilhelm, and many of your favorite writers.
And even though we’re giving Starbucks an alibi for Un-Christmaslike Activities (this time) I should probably send a copy to Howard Schultz. Just in case.
Jonathan V. Last is editor of The Christmas Virtues: A Treasure of Conservative Tales for the Holidays, from Templeton Press, which will be in stores by Black Friday.
