Almost two decades ago, shortly after moving to New York City, I was set up on a blind date—a nice Jewish lawyer my aunt had met at her synagogue. Shortly after the small talk ended, he told me that he had just finished registering a complaint with his employer, a midtown white shoe law firm. “They had a Christmas tree in the lobby but no Hanukkah display. It was ridiculous.” When pressed, of course, he turned out not to be offended. He just thought he should say something on principle.
I was reminded of this story after reading that the president, for the eighth year in a row, has neglected to mention the word “Christmas” in his Christmas card. Instead of writing about Christmas, Jesus, the Bible, or Rudolph, the Obamas said, “Happy holidays. As our family reflects on our many happy years spent in the White House, we are grateful for the friends we’ve made, the joy we’ve shared, and the gifts of kindness we’ve received. We wish you and your loved ones a joyous holiday season and a wonderful new year.”
It’s a lovely sentiment. And I don’t think the president is engaged in any kind of War on Christmas. But can I just say for the record that if the president has decided not to mention Christmas for fear of offending someone, he shouldn’t worry. Almost no one really is.
The so-called Christmas wars didn’t start with Bill O’Reilly. They have been going on for almost as long as the modern celebration of Christmas. In the early 1800s, Christmas was an occasion for the working class to get drunk and vandalize property, according to Gerry Bowler, author of the new book, Christmas in the Crosshairs. But in the mid-19th century, a group of Christmas revivalists, led by the works of Charles Dickens and Clement Clarke Moore (author of “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas”), wrested the holiday into a family-centered celebration. It was then, Bowler writes, that Christmas came to symbolize “charity, family togetherness, reunion, and the importance of parental love for children.”
This understanding of Christmas, including its religious overtones, seemed to be working fine until the last quarter century or so. While Bowler mentions that a group of Jews from Brooklyn objected in 1905 when their public school principal advised them to be more Christ-like, the public schools in this country continued to put on Christmas pageants and teach Christmas carols for several more decades, as my own Jewish mother from Brooklyn can attest.
The battles against religious displays on public property reached the Supreme Court in Lynch v. Donnelly (1984) when the city of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, included a display of a crèche in the holiday display in the city’s shopping district. The Court actually ruled in favor of the city, saying that this was not a violation of the Establishment clause. But over the years, the lawsuits involving Christmas displays and pageants and carols have all had their effect. The public square increasingly became, as Father Richard Neuhaus put it, “naked.”
Wilfred McClay, a historian at the University of Oklahoma who studies religion and culture, notes, “the cause of eliminating Merry Christmas from people’s speech was actively embraced by only a few people, but their effect is magnified, and thus causes others to passively accept it.”
In this way, says McClay, the reluctance to say “Merry Christmas” (even by Christians he knows in Oklahoma) is symbolic not simply of a move to a more secular culture, but also of a culture that increasingly censors what we say. McClay notes, “Like so much else, it’s now about controlling speech, and changing the culture by making more and more things unsayable. It now lines up with the inadmissibility of, say, talking about differences between men and women.”
It doesn’t take a store or even a university anymore to proscribe people from saying “Merry Christmas.” We don’t need an actual lawsuit against a town or a school. Our culture has become one giant safe space where the fear that even the most well-meaning words will cause someone offense overrides any desire even to wish others well. McClay says that the real loss here is not simply that Christians can’t express their religious beliefs but also that “a common culture has been lost.” Christmas carols are actually one of the few things that almost all Americans know. Christmas is “One of few things we still have—like Thanksgiving—that have a kind of binding spiritual overtone.”
I know what he means. I was raised in an unabashedly Jewish home, celebrating holidays, attending a Jewish day school. But my sister and I sang Christmas carols in a local choir. And every year we would watch Miracle on 34th Street and come to visit the Christmas windows in New York.
When store clerks wished us a Merry Christmas, we followed our parents’ lead and said “You too.” Occasionally, if it seemed appropriate, we would tell them that we celebrate Chanukah. Inevitably, they would begin to apologize. But really, folks, there is no need.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is the author of The New Trail of Tears: How Washington Is Destroying American Indians.
