A Look Back at the "War on Christmas"
People have been freaking out about the "War on Christmas" for more than a century.
Today, I’m republishing a series of pieces I originally wrote back in 2021 about the history of the so-called “War on Christmas.” Since most subscribers weren’t yet TPA readers back then, I figured I’d share it again.
Thanks for reading, and as always, I appreciate your support. —Parker
Back in 2019, I spent about a week researching and writing an article for Media Matters about the so-called “War on Christmas.” I wanted to somehow commemorate the 15th anniversary of Bill O’Reilly’s December 3, 2004 declaration that Christmas was “under siege,” and illustrate the destruction that’s come out of the fake annual freak-out. I wrote a piece that I was really proud of, and our great video team put together a great compilation of Fox News Christmas freak-out segments that’s worth a watch:
And while Fox News is largely responsible for the way Christmas has become a one-sided battleground in the modern sense (I think my description of O’Reilly, Tucker Carlson, etc. as “cable news Don Quixotes” remains apt), it was not where this battle began.
The so-called “War on Christmas” began more than a century ago.
Remember Henry Ford? American industrialist, founder of the Ford Motor Company, etc.? He was also a gigantic antisemite. (Also, FYI, this section will involve some discussion about Ford’s antisemitism, so feel free to skip to the next header if you’re not okay with/interested in reading about that.)
In the early 1920s, Ford’s Dearborn Publishing Company released a four-volume set of essays penned by Ford and a handful of aides called The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem. These essays had previously run in Ford’s The Dearborn Independent newspaper, and would go on to inspire the Nazis and their obsession with eugenics. Volume 2, chapter 36, “‘Jewish Rights’ to Put Studies Out of Schools” makes mention of Christmas with a familiar argument to those of us living in the present day (page 181):
In a sense, this was the first shot fired in the “War on Christmas” wars and a blueprint for how these arguments would play-out for the next century. At no point has Christmas or anyone’s right to celebrate it been under attack, yet this endures as a way to attack the ideal of multiculturalism… but more on that tomorrow.
Let’s look back at one of Bill O’Reilly’s 2004 “War on Christmas” segments:
All over the country, Christmas is taking flak. In Denver this past weekend, no religious floats were permitted in the holiday parade there. In New York City, Mayor Bloomberg unveiled the holiday tree and no Christian Christmas symbols are allowed in the public schools. Federated Department Stores, [that's] Macy's, have done away with the Christmas greeting, “Merry Christmas.”
Sound familiar? Or this from National Review columnist Jay Nordlinger in 2010:
Some have said, “You just can't find cards that say ‘Merry Christmas.’ It gets harder and harder.” I know. Kind of like trying to find products not made in China (for who's to say whether they come from laogai, the gulag?). I gave up on the China front long ago. Shameful, I know. But have you ever tried to buy an umbrella not made in China? Also, globalization has done wonders for the average Chinese, gulag or no gulag. Kind of a thorny, upsetting issue.
I gave up on the “Merry Christmas” front too, where cards are concerned. I just get a pretty card that says “Season’s Greetings” or “Whass Happenin' on the Holidays?” or whatever. Life's too short to hunt down “Merry Christmas.”
There’s little daylight between what Ford wrote a century ago in one of his eliminationist manifestos and what conservatives argue today. And this isn’t just some coincidence, either. All that’s changed has been the boogeyman being railed against.
In 1959, the John Birch Society warned that communists and the United Nations were trying to “take Christ out of Christmas.” White nationalist blog VDare began an annual “War on Christmas” contest in 2000, marking what may be the first mention of the phrase in its modern context.
There’s little new about these panics, just as there’s little new about a number of “kids these days” issues
(You can find PDFs of all of the articles below by clicking here)
I came across a 1947 article raging about “The Assault on Christmas”
I was able to find a panicked 1964 newspaper article proclaiming that “Christmas is Christian!”
In 1975, the John Birch Society once again used its influence to make this argument in papers around the country.
In 1978, a Tucson, Arizona newspaper warned that the ACLU (a common villain in the “War on Christmas” narrative) was trying to eliminate “Christ from Christmas,” though that certainly wasn’t part of the civil liberties organization’s agenda.
Years before he turned it into his nightly routine on Fox News, Bill O’Reilly tested the “War on Christmas” waters with a 2001 editorial.
Even President George W. Bush was deemed insufficiently Christian by the Christmas warriors because he dared to use the word “holidays” on greeting cards.
Part 2:
On the internet and in the media, it can sometimes be a bit of a challenge to understand what people are even talking about — especially when it comes to culture war-related outrages. Take this graphic, for instance, which I found in a Facebook group called “I Love Guns” (though I do not know where, exactly, it originated, as versions of it have popped up elsewhere):
Your first response to seeing things like “Santa is a man” and “Baby Jesus was a boy…not a ‘theybie’” might be a big ol’ “WTF is this person talking about???” And that’s understandable. While I recognized some of these talking points, some eluded me.
“Santa is a man” refers to a viral story from a few years back that originated with a graphic design company’s unscientific poll asking people how they would “rebrand” and “modernize” Santa. Respondents were specifically asked to change something about the classic vision of Santa, so this is not evidence of some sort of genuine movement to wipe out Santa as we know him, but rather, just a bad online poll.
Still, it provided conservative media outlets exactly what they needed: an excuse to present this as some sort of movement to strip them of everything they love about Christmas, driven by political correctness (that was in 2018; in 2021, they’d probably blame the equally vague term “wokeness”).
The only reference to Jesus as a “Theybie” I could find was 2019 article from conservative Australian columnist Lucy Carne attacking trans people for daring to criticize a certain author of books featuring a boy wizard. She cites the fake 2018 “gender-neutral Santa” poll and an instance of a woman writing that people were mean to her in a Facebook group she happened to be in (which was in no way newsworthy and not some sign of a giant trend if it happened at all) before launching into a completely bonkers rant about things that haven’t happened.
What next in the war on gender? Must Mary only be referred to as a pregnant person (not woman), who gave birth to Theybie Jesus? And she was visited by the Three Wise Thems and Little Drummer Enby? Will Mr and Mrs Claus become Mx Claus? Will we be singing “I saw Maddy (nonbinary Mummy and Daddy pronoun) kissing Santa Claus?” And will genderless priest robots deliver sermens?
Other items on this list are familiar to me if for no other reason than the fact that for years a big part of my job was keeping tabs on what was happening in right-wing media. For instance, the odd “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer actually teaches kids NOT to be bullies” line is throwback to a 2018 round of right-wing outrage sparked by right-wing media pretending that a video listed under HuffPost’s “Comedy” vertical meant to be a tongue-in-cheek “Viewers Noticed Some Very Disturbing Details In ‘Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer’” joke was an actual “We need to talk about this problematic thing” post, which it wasn’t. Anybody who looked at this for more than two seconds would realize this was a joke… and the video was filled with joke tweets… several from comedians. “The North Pole needs a HR department. All these bosses are horrible,” reads one of the jokes.
Just look at the replies to that post on Twitter. It was completely and totally deranged.
But days (and even weeks) after the HuffPost video got posted, right-wing media kept insisting that yes, the left was trying to ban Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer from TV (in 2021, they would have probably said something like, “The left wants to cancel Rudolph!!!”) There’s no doubt in my mind that the people working at Fox, for instance, were aware that the video was a joke. They just knew that their audience was fired up and decided to run with it.
The coverage just kept on coming.
But because nothing in the world is actually original anymore, Fox was essentially just rehashing something it aired way back in 2011 when it invited a professor of some sort to come on air and claim that Rudolph sends the wrong message. They were only able to get a day’s worth of content from that, but it shows exactly how the right-wing outrage machine works when it comes to “War on Christmas” stuff or anything else. The goal is always to present individual comments as though they’re representative of the larger movement. This strategy will be discussed more in the next edition of this newsletter.
Victimhood lies at the center of the “War on Christmas.” It’s that simple.
In 2014, a group of Muslim parents asked to have the religious holidays of Ramadan and Eid al-Adha added to the calendar that gets printed and handed out to students every year. The reasoning made sense. If Christmas and Easter (Christian) and Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur (Jewish) were listed on the school’s calendar, why not their holidays, as well? Plus, it’s not that these parents were asking for additional days off from school, just that their holidays be given equal billing as other religious observances in the school’s official calendar. Purely symbolic. Should be easy enough, right?
Rather than do that, and rather than risk a lawsuit for seemingly favoring certain religions above others, the school board decided to instead remove Christmas, Easter, Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur from its calendars for the following year. That’s how much members of the school board hated Muslims. This… was not at all what the Muslim group was hoping for. From a Washington Post article at the time:
“By stripping the names Christmas, Easter, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, they have alienated other communities now, and we are no closer to equality,” said Saqib Ali, a former Maryland state delegate and co-chair of the Equality for Eid Coalition. “It’s a pretty drastic step, and they did it without any public notification.”
Zainab Chaudry, also a co-chair of the coalition, expressed dismay, too, contending the school board’s members were willing to “go so far as to paint themselves as the Grinch who stole Christmas” to avoid granting equal treatment for the Muslim holiday.
“They would remove the Christian holidays and they would remove the Jewish holidays from the calendar before they would consider adding the Muslim holiday to the calendar,” she said.
A rational person would look at this and think, “Oh wow, the way this school board treated Muslims was wrong! And look at the lengths the board went to in order to avoid having to acknowledge the existence of Muslim holidays!”
Instead, the response went a lot like this: “School Dumps Christmas to Appease Muslims”
For one, the school did not “dump” Christmas. Kids still got Christmas off, and this was purely symbolic. But beyond that, this was pretty clearly an act of anti-Muslim bigotry, not anti-Christian. Even so, it ended up getting people extremely angry in conservative media circles. The ability to take something that happened because Christians on the school board had a problem with Muslims and brand it as “anti-Christian” is exactly the kind of nonsense that keeps popping up in the “War on Christmas.”
Part 3:
As I wrap up my “War on Christmas” series, I’d like to draw attention to the reason for the (pretend attack on the reason for the) season: politics.
Last week, a Fairleigh Dickinson University poll found that more Americans than ever believe that there is a “war on Christmas.” From the summary:
[N]early 4 in 10 (37 percent) Americans now saying that politicians are trying to remove the religious elements of the Holiday season, up from 29 percent in 2013. At the same time, the percent of Americans who “strongly disagree” that there is a war on Christmas has declined from a majority (54 percent) in 2013, to 37 percent today. According to a new national survey from the FDU Poll, this increase is driven by Republicans, Trump supporters, and, surprisingly, Hispanic Americans.
When presented with the statement, “There has been a concerted effort by politicians to take ‘Christ’ out of ‘Christmas,’” just 14% of Biden voters either “strongly agreed” or “somewhat agreed” with the premise. Meanwhile, a whopping 71% of Trump voters either “strongly agreed” or “somewhat agreed” with it.
This shouldn’t exactly come as a surprise. While running for president in both 2016 and 2020, Trump would somewhat regularly claim that Christmas was under attack and that “If I become president, we’re gonna be saying ‘Merry Christmas’ at every store. You can leave ‘happy holidays’ at the corner. … Other religions can do what they want.”
Now, of course, this was a nonsense “promise.” “We’re gonna be saying ‘Merry Christmas’ at every store”? Really? Every store? Naturally, PolitiFact, the organization that refused to say that Trump broke his promise not to make cuts to Medicare and Social Security because while he tried to do that, Congress prevented him from doing it, gave him a “Promise Kept” for this ludicrous Christmas claim. (Please, guys, either stick with hyper literalism or not, you can’t just hop back and forth between whichever makes your preferred candidate look better, you bunch of Trumpers. I could go on and on about PolitiFact and about how they tried to get me in trouble at my last job because I criticized them on Twitter, but that’s a story for a different day…)
Was it absolutely ridiculous to run on an “I will bring back Christmas” platform? Yes. Was it a fake solution to an imaginary problem? Also yes. …but did it make for good politics? …sadly, yes once again.
The “saving Christmas” industry is a busy one! Looking at IMDB, the holiday has been saved by dogs, boys, men, Ernest, elves, trees, toys, drones, bears, cops, vampires, Kirk Cameron, Elmo, nutcrackers, and… well, you get the idea. So why not be the politician who saved Christmas?
Trump sure is lucky that the press is so willing to spread his “War on Christmas” propaganda.
I don’t think I’ll ever stop being salty about this December 24, 2017, Washington Post story titled, “In a pro-Trump town, they never stopped saying ‘Merry Christmas.’”
I mean, “they never stopped saying ‘Merry Christmas’” in any town. WTF kind of headline was this?
Post national political correspondent Jenna Johnson penned this pro-Trump piece centered around the cries of victimhood from the former president’s supporters.
“We’ve always said ‘Merry Christmas,’ ” said Melissa Cobb, 48, a local hairstylist wearing dangling cross earrings, who voted for President Trump and gathered before the parade with fellow church members and clients in the beauty salon where she works. She added that no one in the town has ever been offended by her saying the phrase.
“It offends me,” she continued, “to see at the stores, where they just do ‘Happy Holidays’ or ‘Seasons Greetings.’ It should be ‘Merry Christmas.’ Put Christ back into Christmas. That’s what it’s supposed to be. . . . I just wish we would all get on the same page.”
Johnson would go on to amplify baseless claims that there was an “erosion of the rights of Christians in the country.”
Roger Barber, a 60-year-old salesman who lives in the next town over and voted for Trump, said he doesn’t think the president can fully stop the erosion of the rights of Christians in the country, but he hopes the president tries “to put the brakes on it.”
“The government, I think, is trying to oppress Christianity with some of the policies that they come up with. They’re trying to oppress it, force people out of what they believe in,” Barber said as he finished up lunch at Hens and Hogs BBQ on Squirrel Hollow Drive. “Like, the cake issue that’s before the Supreme Court right now. The Supreme Court having to decide whether a Christian can bake a cake or not, or has the right to refuse to bake the cake.”
“Whether a Christian can bake a cake or not,” is one hell of a way of saying “Whether Christians don’t have to follow the same nondiscrimination laws as everybody else.”
But there was one telling moment in the piece that I’m happy Johnson kept in there. Just straight-up racism and religious bigotry: that’s what the obsession with demanding everyone wish them a “Merry Christmas” is really all about — even if some Christmas warriors don’t know it.
“We can’t say ‘Christmas,’ because there’s too many Muslims and Buddhists and Hindus, and it offends them,” said Naomi DePriest, a property manager in her mid-50s whose husband farms, over a lunch of fried catfish and ribs at Hens and Hogs. “I think they should keep Christ in Christmas, which is what they said originally, and to heck with anybody that don’t like it. Anybody that’s Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist, let them do what they want to do, but don’t criticize those that want to keep Christ in Christmas.”
See that? “Too many Muslims and Buddhists and Hindus.” It’s not about a holiday greeting, it’s about Christian nationalism.
Once you realize that the right-wing demand that everybody says “Merry Christmas” is really just a proxy in their fight against religious freedom, the success of it all should have you worried.
While some people were pointing out the hypocrisy of First Lady Melania Trump’s “Who gives a f*** about the Christmas stuff and decorations?” statement, which was greeted with a shrug by the very people who shout about the “War on Christmas” (had a Democratic politician or spouse been caught on tape saying this, right-wing media would still be yelling about it and pointing to it as evidence of Democratic hate for the holiday and its celebrants to this day), others understood that this wasn’t ever actually about Christmas at all. It was about the goal of imposing their religious beliefs on others.
The Supreme Court is on the verge of overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, and religious zealots both on and off the court are just getting started.
Jonathan Mitchell, a lawyer who helped craft Texas’ six-week ban on abortion (and subject of a disgustingly fawning New York Times profile), along with Adam K. Mortara, laid out their long-term goals for the Supreme Court in an amicus brief they filed with the court arguing not just against Roe, but against Lawrence v. Texas and Obergefell v. Hodges, which decriminalized sodomy and granted nationwide marriage equality, respectively:
The news is not as good for those who hope to preserve the court-invented rights to homosexual behavior and same-sex marriage. See Lawrence, 539 U.S. 558; Obergefell 576 U.S. 644. These “rights,” like the right to abortion from Roe, are judicial concoctions, and there is no other source of law that can be invoked to salvage their existence. Mississippi suggests that Obergefell could be defended by invoking the “fundamental right to marry” which is “fundamental as a matter of history and tradition.’” Pet. Br. at 13 (quoting Obergefell, 576 U.S. at 671). But a “fundamental right” must be defined with specificity before assessing whether that right is “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.” See Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702, 721 (1997) (requiring federal courts to employ a “careful description” of conduct or behavior that a litigant alleges to be protected by the Constitution, and forbidding resort to generalizations and abstractions). Otherwise, long-prohibited conduct can be made into a “fundamental right” that is “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” so long as a litigant is creative enough to define the “right” at a high enough level of abstraction. The right to marry an opposite-sex spouse is “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition”; the right to marry a same-sex spouse obviously is not.
This is not to say that the Court should announce the overruling of Lawrence and Obergefell if it decides to overrule Roe and Casey in this case. But neither should the Court hesitate to write an opinion that leaves those decisions hanging by a thread. Lawrence and Obergefell, while far less hazardous to human life, are as lawless as Roe.
In other words, the religious right is getting very serious about turning back the clock to a time where women, LGBTQ individuals, and people of color didn’t have equal rights under the law. And they see nothing wrong with this.
Are all of the 71% of Trump voters who believe there’s a “war on Christmas” on board with the extreme Christian nationalist direction this country is being steered towards? Almost certainly not. Still, when presented with this idea neatly packaged as a debate over whether or not there is sufficient outrage that the check-out clerk at Target wished you a “Happy Holidays” instead of a hearty “Merry Christmas” as you swing through to pick up a bag of kitty litter on your way home from work, they’ll take it. Why? Because it makes them feel like they’re under attack, like they’re the underdogs, like they’re the victims of a culture war and not the bullies who’ve been waging it.
“The ‘War on Christmas’ narrative is appealing because it lets Christians lay a claim to victimhood,” said Dan Cassino, executive director of Farleigh Dickinson’s recent poll and a professor of Government and Politics at the school. “If you’re part of a group that’s been dominant for hundreds of years, movements towards equality tend to feel like discrimination.”
In short, the “War on Christmas” is a good way to get people on the right involved in a movement that ultimately has little to do with holiday greetings and everything to do with making them feel justified in efforts to bully others out of their rights, to claim that they’re only defending their own rights. In 2013, Bill O’Reilly even said as much, arguing that the “War on Christmas” mattered because if we don’t reinforce the idea that we’re a “Christian nation,” that it would lead to “unfettered abortion” and gay marriage! (he also said something similar in 2012) *gasp*
tl;dr: There is no war on Christmas. There just isn’t. There’s a war on actual religious liberty being waged by the right under the guise of a “War on Christmas.”
There is a war on Christmas, I am personally waging it, and it will end when the holiday respects the Black Friday boundary and gets the fuck out of the rest of November.
Maybe depicting Santa in drag would endear the left to Christmas again.