“Look, Charlie, let’s face it. We all know that Christmas is a big commercial racket. It’s run by a big eastern syndicate, you know.” — Lucy Van Pelt

Image Credit: Steven Perez

In the modern American Culture Wars, there is no more peculiar battlefront than the so-called “War on Christmas”.  The amount of hand-wringing and hysterical yelling over plastic lawn ornaments and the “proper” seasonal greeting is really nothing short of astounding.

Historically, the idea of Christmas as a christian celebration is a fairly new idea.  Early Christmas celebrations were largely pagan festivals with a few mentions of Jesus here and there.  As times progressed, more puritanical Christians began to reject the celebration of Christmas as improper, partly because of the solemnity of the occasion and partly because of the pagan origins of many of the Christmas traditions (candles, Yule logs, Christmas Trees, etc).

Given the historical ambivalence to public celebration of this holiday, you would think that fundamentalists and organized christian groups wouldn’t put so much emphasis on forcing people to apply the Christmas label to everything.  Of course, you’d be wrong.

The notion of celebrating Christmas as we do nowadays is largely a product of the Victorian Era (perhaps not coincidentally, the time when England’s Industrial Revolution began to pay returns in the form of a larger, wealthier and more educated middle class).  Past arguments with regard to the “war on Christmas” include the use of the term “Xmas”.  The origin of the term Xmas comes from the greek spelling of Christ, which begins with the letter Chi (X).  However, many people mistakenly assume it was meant to remove the name Christ from Christmas, and some went as far as to accuse a world Jewish conspiracy of using Xmas and Santa Claus to subvert the true “reason for the season.”

The heated arguments over companies using Christmas in their greetings and advertisements seem at odds with the idea of trying to return Christmas to its religious roots.  Forcing companies that exploit the commercial nature of the holiday to identify with the holiday seems anathema to what fundamentalist Christians should be doing: returning the holiday’s primary meaning to the birth of Jesus.

One of the sillier aspects of this war is the fight over public Christmas displays on government property.  The rule is surprisingly easy to learn, if a little hard to apply in some circumstances.  The basic idea is that a display focusing on a single religion’s symbolism is impermissible, but something either religiously neutral or showing multiple religious symbols is OK.  For example, a large nativity scene by itself is likely not an acceptable display.  However, a menorah and a Christmas tree might be acceptable.  This distinction has become known somewhat derisively as the “two plastic reindeer rule,” since one of the original cases focused on the fact that the display included a plastic Santa Claus and reindeer.

The logic behind these sorts of cases isn’t significantly different from the bans on displays of the Ten Commandments in government offices and courthouses: the state can’t play favorites with religion.  If the only religious holidays a government recognizes are Christian holidays, then how can one argue Christianity isn’t receiving special treatment?

It may seem nitpicky to me to argue over what decorations get put up in Town Hall, but until the current understanding of the First Amendment changes, purely Christian displays just aren’t allowed, and civil servants above all others should respect that.  It’s certainly reasonable for laymen to disagree, but civil servants have an obligation to serve the public and conform themselves to right and lawful behavior.  Just like I won’t become a criminal prosecutor because I don’t want to enforce immoral laws and defend unethical police behavior, a person who really wants to celebrate the religious nature of Christmas at work should find a job that allows for it.