The Volokh Conspiracy

Money quote from Marshall, "As usual, I will not participate. I still prefer to keep church and state apart."

Lol, seriously. One night a Christmas party, the next night inquisitions against all those who dare call it the "Holiday Season."

If the courts could only have more people like Chief Judge Berrigan of the Eastern District of Louisiana. She celebrates/respects nearly every holiday under the sun.

I have found a consistent inability to distinguish between what a thing IS and what it is CALLED.

If your recess happens the last week in December, irrespective of whether Hannukah overlaps or is in the last week of November, then it is a CHRISTMAS break, not a HOLIDAY break.

If you are cutting down a pine tree and sticking it inside in December, it is a CHRISTMAS tree, not a HOLIDAY tree.

If you change the guy's name from Jesus Christ to Jesus Holiday, you won't find many non-Christians will start worshipping him.

That is simply what those things are. Calling them something else doesn't change anything.

This is completely different from saying Merry Christmas versus Happy Holidays. Saying Merry Christmas means, "Have a good Christmas." Happy holidays mean, "Enjoy whatever holiday you happen to celebrate." I have no idea why anyone is angry that commercial establishments are sending one message rather than the other.

A person could have a Christmas party, or he could have a Holiday party -- those are two different things, and you can have either one, but you just can't have one and call it the other one.

People should stop worrying about what things are called, and started looking at what they really are.

Richard,

I'm mostly with you, except that my tree usually stays up until at least February. So, on the "look to the dates" theory, it is probably more a "Procrastination Tree" than anything else.

If your recess happens the last week in December, irrespective of whether Hannukah overlaps or is in the last week of November, then it is a CHRISTMAS break, not a HOLIDAY break.

If you are cutting down a pine tree and sticking it inside in December, it is a CHRISTMAS tree, not a HOLIDAY tree.

THANK you! I have no problem with people saying "Happy Holidays" for the sake of brevity, but it does disturb me greatly that there seems to be this trend of taking everything that is specific to Christmas, and turning it into a generic symbol of...nothing.

MaryC,

Although if you go back far enough, it was actually Christians appropriating a preexisting midwinter holiday, and a preexisting set of associated traditions (including the tree), not the other way around. So, I don't see the problem if some people want to revive the even older traditions that have since been blended with the specifically Christian traditions.

dk35:

I have to believe that had God himself not stepped out of Heaven to stop such a thing from happening, that the Righteous Christians of today would have come out of the woodwork and overturned the government, returning this country to its true Christian heritage and stoning those that would attempt such a blasphemous act in the public square.

Eugene has posted on this before, and I think he has the right of it. People who do not celebrate Christmas should not be offended by "Merry Christmas," even if they do not celebrate Christmas. The intention is clearly a benign (at worst) one, and, besides, who wouldn't want to have a Merry December 25th, even if you don't happen to celebrate the holiday that falls on that date?

On the other hand, those people who are upset that "Happy Holidays" has replaced "Merry Christmas" also are being unreasonable. Again, there's a well-meaning intention behind it, not a war against Christmas or Christ. Besides, I've always viewed "Happy Holidays" as encompassing New Year's.

In the end, it's a semantic choice that's meant to be polite and cherery any way it's said. Why do we need to let semantics wreck the cheer and good will that's behind either of the statements?

The problem is that we have a minority of people who preach tolerance and hypocritically get offended at every turn when they hear speech that conflicts with their own sad belief system. So you want to call your party a holiday party in order not to offend anyone. I say, why do you grovel to this cowardly minority of people who need to grow up and have some true tolerance? I would have no problem with a Jewish business having a Hanakah party. I would even attend it AND not get offended. They have the right to celebrate their religion, just as Christians do. What about the majority of people you offend for supporting humanism?

"Does any other faith traditinoally haul an evergreen tree into their living room and decorate it?" There used to be one, but so-called Christian knights slaughtered it's last practitioners nearly 1,000 years ago...

Touché.

Forgive me for only thinking of the last 200 years when I think of the term "traditional." :)

It's not just the Christmas tree, though. That's just an example. What disturbs me is the fact that some people are just so incredibly hypersensitive that the entire country is twisting itself into legalistic knots in order to avoid offending them. Everybody else has to sit down and deal with it. This is tolerance? There just seems to be a lot of anti-Christian sentiment in today's society, and the second that one of us stands up and says, "Okay, everybody that's enough", then we're either mocked (Oh, poor Christians...saying that they're being persecuted again.), or slapped down (You intolerant Bible-thumpers just want to get rid of all other religions!). We can't win. Anti-Christianity has grown exponentially in the last 20 years...where will it end? Maybe I'm being paranoid for thinking that our traditions need to be protected, but maybe we've all just had our heads in the sand up until now.

Medis has failed to note that this country was founded on Christian beliefs and there is a constant bedrock foundation of Christianity in every part of our daily lives. Without it, society would crumble. Those trying to paint Christmas as a "holiday" weaken the foundation, the eventuality is chaos.

I think for many Christians (including myself), it's not about having or not having any particular celebration or recognition; indeed many make the point that they're not theologically required for most denominations.

Rather, it's simply a clash of equally subjective worldviews between ecumenicalism/pluralism vs. exclusive/absolute truth. To those subscribing to the former, public/universal assertions of the latter are received as arrogant and offensive. On the other hand, ecumenical approaches deliberately designed to dilute a pre-existing doctrinal significance are likewise perceived as an "attack" by those who are offended by the primacy of inclusiveness.

Does any other faith traditinoally haul an evergreen tree into their living room and decorate it?

We're still here, and many pagans decorate trees for Solstice. The practice predates Christianty, and it was borrowed along with other practices.

One interesting point about the whole "war on Christmas" issue is that the usual villain in the campaign against "secularism" is Hollywood, but that villain is entirely missing from the so-called "war on Christmas" because the TV schedules are full of Christmas shows, both regular television shows like Everybody Loves Christmas, special movies and reruns of classic movies such as A Christmas Carol and It's a Wonderful Life.

As capitalists, the stores want 100% of Americans to buy presents, trees, ornaments for trees, etc. So if holiday trees are "politically incorrect" and the proper name for a decorated evergreen is a Christmas tree, does that mean that only Christians should buy Christmas trees?

In my New England town, I had a conversation with the Christian mother of my daughter's friend, and she told me that she thought it was good that I as a Jew did not have a Christmas tree. I read a study that 82% of Jews don't have Christmas trees; that suggests that 18% do. Are they wrong to have a tree and call it a holiday tree or a Hannukah bush?

When I told another friend of Jon Stewart's line that 100% of our Presidents have been Christian, she told me that she disagreed. She thought that Thomas Jefferson was not a Christian because he did not believe that Christ was divine. He certainly was a Deist.

I'm not insulted when someone wishes me Merry Christmas, but I do prefer hearing Happy Holidays. And it is bizarre to me that anyone can be insulted by calling the time off from school "winter break." The main point is that Christians get their holiday off from school. And the break usually includes New Year's and other days besides Christmas. (And even Jewish schools in American close the last week in December. I suppose no one minds if my children's Hebrew school calls the last two weeks in December a winter break). I always have to write notes to get my children excused from school on the Jewish holidays.

Believe me, no one in American can avoid knowing that the federal holiday is Christmas.

I agree Smithy. And for what it is worth, while I am not a religious person myself, I also think that public displays and celebrations of religion are part of our country's history of religious tolerance, and that practice should be encouraged and continued. My only caveat is that the government should not be sponsoring, endorsing, or otherwise favoring these displays and celebrations. But that principle should not prevent religious people from using public fora to display and celebrate on their own dime.

My only caveat is that the government should not be sponsoring, endorsing, or otherwise favoring these displays and celebrations.

I disagree but I see where you are coming from. I think the Founding Fathers meant for this to be a Christian nation, but unfortunately they wrote the Constitution in such a way that that this isn't clear, so many reasonable people believe the opposite -- that they believed in the separation of church and state. But I think when you look closely at the disagreements, they aren't all that great. Sometimes too much is made of very minor points of contention. And I'm probably as guilty of that as anyone.

Smithy,

The Founding Fathers were a diverse bunch when it came to religious matters. But for what it is worth, even those who argued in favor of a strong separation between church and state thought that such a wall was justified in part because of the threat the state posed to religion. So, in that sense even those who favored this separation were "pro-religious" in their own way.

And I think that is just as true today, in fact. Indeed, as Ken notes, "ceremonial deism" is in some sense more damaging to religion than "genuine theism". And so you might want to think about whether you really want government officials in charge of religious matters.

Assuming TWOC="The War on Christmas", I direct you to the history I noted above. In a nutshell, Christmas was not celebrated widely in America until the late 19th Century (eg, it wasn't a federal holiday until 1870).