I Saw Jackie Mason Kissing Santa Claus
by Frank Rich
The good news today is that the great 2005 war on Christmas, the conflagration that launched a thousand op-ed pieces and nearly as many battles on Fox News, is now officially over. And yes, Virginia - Christmas won!
Secularists, Jews, mainline Protestants and all the other grinches failed utterly to take Kriss Kringle down. Except at those megachurches that canceled services today rather than impede their flocks' giving and gorging, Christmas is alive and well everywhere in America.
Last night NBC even rolled the dice and broadcast "It's a Wonderful Life" in prime time. With courage reminiscent of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's defiance of Stalin, the network steadfastly refused to redub the final scene's cries of "Merry Christmas!" with the godless "Happy holidays!"
As Michelle Goldberg wrote last month in her definitive debunking for Salon, there was in fact no war on Christmas, but rather "a burgeoning myth of a war on Christmas."
Most of the grievances cited by Christmas's whiniest protectors - red and green banned from residents' wardrobes in Michigan, "Silent Night" censored in Wisconsin - were either anomalous idiocies or suburban legends.
The calls for boycotts against chain stores with heathen holiday trees lost their zing when it turned out that even George and Laura Bush's Christmas card had called for a happy "holiday season."
But like every other chapter of irrational hysteria in America's cultural history, from the burning of "witches" in colonial Salem to the panic induced by Orson Welles's radio broadcast of the fictional "War of the Worlds" on the eve of World War II, the fake war on Christmas was not without its hidden meanings. Or not so hidden.
If you worked at Fox News, wouldn't you want to change the subject from the war in Iraq to a war in which victory is a slam-dunk?
Rabble-rousing paranoia about a supposed assault on Christmas also has a strong anti-Semitic and far-right pedigree.
In Salon, Ms. Goldberg noted that fulmination about supposed Jewish opposition to Christmas dates to Henry Ford's infamous "The International Jew" of 1921.
That chord is sounded in the very first anecdote in the book by the Fox News anchor John Gibson, "The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought": a devastated father discovers that his 4-year-old son has brought home preschool artwork showing a Hanukkah menorah and Kwanzaa candles, rather than a Christmas tree.
But Mr. Gibson goes on to add ecumenically that "not just Jewish people" are out to kill Christmas. As he elucidated on Christian radio, all non-Christians are "following the wrong religion," though he reassures us that they will be tolerated "as long as they're civil and behave."
Even so, much of this manufactured war was more banal than malicious. Like Christmas itself, an anti-Christmas scare is an ideal means for moving merchandise.
The first Fox News segment warning darkly of a war on Christmas occurred on Oct. 20 - coincidentally the very day that Mr. Gibson's book hit the nation's bookstores. Many of the five dozen ensuing Fox segments contained lavish plugs for the book or for the Christmas baubles hawked by Bill O'Reilly on his Web site - no yuletide loofahs, alas.
(His wares were initially listed as "holiday" gifts until a Web exposé forced a frantic rebranding.)
Read the whole thing. .
Frank Rich War on Christmas Christmas Politics Culture War Rich New York Times
