One of the understated conflicts in the United States today is whether Christmas is first and foremost a cultural holiday or a religious one.
Of course, the holiday began as a celebration of the birth of Jesus, the central figure in Christianity. Since the vast majority of Americans were Christians, the observation of the holiday was common. The United States may never have been an official Christian country, but for all intents and purposes, its people were.
Over the decades, however, things began to change. Some Americans became nominal Christians — those who go through the motions without actually believing the dogma. Others became skeptics, adopted other religions, or became secular atheists or agnostics. An increasing number of immigrants brought other religions to the United States. For all of these people, Christmas became a cultural holiday that everyone celebrated and contained the general themes of gift-giving, goodwill towards people and peace on Earth. In this worldview, “Happy Holidays!” became more appropriate than “Merry Christmas!”
Secondly, the holiday became increasingly commercialized, a fact that continued to downplay the religious aspects of Christmas and reinforce the cultural part of the celebration. Everyone can give gifts; not everyone is a Christian. If you ask most people — even a good number of Christians – what they picture when they think of “Christmas,” you’ll probably hear Christmas trees, gifts, snowflakes, and dinner with the family. Jesus will probably be an afterthought.
This, I imagine, is the reason that many evangelical Christians are getting so upset and declaring that a “War on Christmas” exists. They see its transition from a religious holiday to a cultural one, and they don’t know how to reverse the trend. It’s incredibly difficult to fight against a meta-shift in society, so all they can do is throw darts at their usual suspects: Jews, secularists, and the ACLU.
With Christmas becoming more of a cultural holiday rather than one with specific, religious connotations, more and more non-Christians are celebrating. Take this insightful New York Times article, for example:
So here we are: two newlywed Jews celebrating our No No Noel (or Ho Ho Hanukkah) not because we secretly want to convert to Christianity, but because the rampant commercialization of Christmas works! Like your kids who desperately want the toys they see advertised on TV, I wanted monogrammed velvet stockings and my husband wanted the model train that goes around the tree and puffs actual smoke.
Still, from a Jewish point of view, this article is dismaying. It’s as if the writer was a 10-year-old girl who went, “Oh, tinsel! Shiny!” and then adopted the holiday purely out of a desire for material, well, stuff. For her, Chanukah decorations simply weren’t “beautiful” enough. It’s an open admission that the mass-commercialization of Christmas is indeed making the holiday into a cultural event that spans the United States instead of a religious one for Christians.
