|
. |
James Wolcott, a beloved blogger in the birding community, wrote about my Christmas column the other day. Actually, he wrote about what Instapundit wrote about it. Go read; I'll be here when you come back. Highlights: I think he's right. It just him, he is overly sensitive, and he doesn't get it, whatever "it" is. But then Glenn Reynolds takes a time-out from drooling over digital cameras to poke his head out of the badger hole and amen Lilek's observation. "I've noticed the same thing," he posts, before lowering periscope. So that makes two of them. This "fear of Christmas" is a phantom menace conjured every year so that certain crybaby Christians can adopt victim status and model a pained expression over the sad fact that not everyone around them isn't carrying on like the Cratchits. This thin-skinned grievance-collecting gives birth to all sorts of urban legends and rumors about big institutions being hostile to Christ's birthday, such as the one that swirled on WOR radio last week about how Macy's employees had been instructed not to say "Merry Christmas!" to shoppers. A fiction that was put to rest when the host hit Macy's website and saw its "Merry Christmas" greeting, and Macy's employees chimed in over the phones to say there was no such policy. To read conservative pundits, you'd think everybody was wishing each other Happy Kwanzaa! and averting their eyes from oh so gauche Nativity scenes. I've got news: Even here on the godless, liberal Upper West Side, people wish each other Merry Christmas without staggering three steps backward, thunderstruck and covered with chagrin. Which of course was precisely my point. I believe it was quite clear in the column, where I explicitly condemned the godless networks for not having an animatronic Baby Jesus read the news the third week of December, or running a crawl below all prime-time programming spelling out the recipe for figgy pudding. As long-time readers of this site will note, I am not just a loud militant Christian who wants to tamp the thick bristling wad of God down everyone’s throat with a miter, I am frequently given to posting long MP3 files of myself sobbing in despair over the fact that advent candles are not forcibly screwed into the facial apertures of government officials. That’s me, all right. Actually, the column had to do with the way clerks just seem flummoxed when you say “Merry Christmas,” something I noted after several outings at the mall. It also concerned the curious way the Post Office titled its “holiday” stamps. As for Crachit, well society is generally in full Crachit mode this time of year, since Christmas has become irrevocably fixed in that illusionary Victorian age of top hats, pigs with apples in their mouths, hordes of cheery urchins saying “bless ‘ee, guvnor!” and the rest of the nonsense that has accreted around the bones of the Dickens classic. I have no great sympathy for the period, but if that’s what we have, then that’s what we have. I don’t feel like a victim, in any case. The column addressed religion only to note that it’s an honor to have someone wish me happiness on a day that’s central to their creed, whatever it might be. But you’d have to read the column to get that point, and clicking on links is dangerous work. There are so many nowadays. Your hand could just seize up at some point, and you’d be unable to type a deathless entries like this, which not only define the word “arch” but remind you why no one uses it anymore. Well, that was unfair. I've done worse. Often. Anyway. This thin-skinned grievance-collecting gives birth to all sorts of urban legends and rumors about big institutions being hostile to Christ's birthday, such as the one that swirled on WOR radio last week about how Macy's employees had been instructed not to say "Merry Christmas!" to shoppers. A fiction that was put to rest when the host hit Macy's website and saw its "Merry Christmas" greeting, and Macy's employees chimed in over the phones to say there was no such policy. Did I mention Macy’s? I did not. Next: To read conservative pundits, you'd think everybody was wishing each other Happy Kwanzaa! and averting their eyes from oh so gauche Nativity scenes. Perhaps. I don’t know. Back to what I actually wrote: the Post Office’s webpage of seasonal stamps named Kwanzaa, twice; ditto Hanukkah. Fine! Great! Who cares? But it called the Christmas stamp “Holiday Traditional.” I thought this was . . . unusual. Of course I meant so much more, but I dasn’t let on what I really feel. I did write a long, angry paragraph about how I blamed this webpage on sodomite penetration of the venerable postal service (just typing the words now stirs something horrid in my cold, gristled loins) and I warned you all, warned you, that unless we put CHRISTMAS atop the page in 72 point type we are doomed to go the way of ancient Rome, lost in a swirl of sybaritic vapors and unable to resist the Huns with thier hordes of gay Jewish trial lawyers, or something like that. But I took it out. The truth may set you free, but it gets you called to the editor’s office, too. I’m on shaky ground as it is, coming out with a Brave Defence of Christmas in a major newspaper. I've got news: Even here on the godless, liberal Upper West Side, people wish each other Merry Christmas without staggering three steps backward, thunderstruck and covered with chagrin. Well. If they’re saying Merry Christmas on the Upper West Side, then obviously my first-hand observations in Minnesota shopping malls are baseless. I stand covered with chastenedness. If I were a dyslexic atheist I’d say I don’t have a god in this fight. What amuses me, if that’s the term, is the way retailers and large media have shied away from saying “Merry Christmas” because it might offend the prissy little busybodies who spend their life like a dental filling in a tinfoil blizzard. It’s not because these organizaions have great red flaming antipathy to Christianity; they’re just taking the path of least resistance. Quietly scuttling Columbus Day sales doesn’t mean they are opposed to 15th century Iberian seafarers; it just means they don’t want protestors on the sales floor throwing blood on the Calvin Klein hosiery in the name of the anti-imperialistic cause. It’s been a long time coming. Tonight I went back to the Strib archives, and looked at how the paper and its advertisers handled Christmas through the years. Eighty years ago today the Star ran an ad from the Twin Cities streetcar company:  The front page of the paper weighed in on Christmas Eve with a big picture of that noted saint, Tiny Tim. Below, this Onionesque headline:  Most of the ads mention Christmas, and you get the impression that they didn’t have a synonym for the day yet. But there’s also an account of a “Christmas Pageant” for the “City’s Settlement Children” – a benefit staged by local businessmen for the city’s orphanages and foundling houses. Christmas songs were sung – no titles given – and the dramatic portion was given over entirely to a play about Tom Thumb and various Mother Goose characters. So the idea of a secular Christmas festival for the public wasn’t exactly new. I doubt anyone cared at the time, because they didn’t sense that a nativity scene had been avoided or removed because someone had complained. Who’d complain? Bolshevists? Hah! As if we’ll listen to them! Jews, the lot of ‘em! Ads in ’44 mentioned Christmas a great deal; it was one of the things we were fighting for. (That list was very long. Peace and freedom at the top, new razor blades at the bottom, and a thousand things in between.) But perhaps a better glimpse of the culture can be found in an old “Suspense” radio show I heard the other day; it was a wartime Thanksgiving program, and the announcer gave a list of things for which the audience should be grateful, including “our God-granted victories in the war.” It’s impossible to imagine a network announcer declaring today that a victory in the war was not just something for which we should thank God, but something that had been granted by God. I suspect that if a Fox anchor ascribed the conquest of Fallujah to God’s will, Wolcott would erupt in hives so great and so lurid his cats would scuttle under the sofa, and would not come out until he’d coaxed them out with a crab cake from Dean and Deluca. But that was the common vocabulary back then – not because 100% of the people believed it, but simply because that was the language of the public square. Those who thought it was BS shrugged and dealt with it and got on with things, I suspect. By 1954 half the ads said “Season’s Greetings.” The paper had a huge double-page spread of small ads. This is typical:  Nice and safe. But I think “Season’s Greetings” and “Happy Holidays” were, at first, new ways of saying the same old thing. You didn’t get the sense that they were trying to avoid anything, especially when they used clip art that showed wise men and a star. The balance began to shift in the 80s; by 2002 – the last year I had the time to scroll through on the microfiche – it’s all Seasons Greetings, with a few small “Merry Christmas” holdouts from small specialty stores. When you look at eight decades over the course of an hour, you can literally see the “Merry Christmas” fade from the newspaper. And if the term has faded from the common language of advertising, then it reflects something in the culture. Or rather the overculture – that twitchy, cheery, idiot blare produced by a stratum of coastal types who think the rest of America truly gives a shite whether Lindsay Lohan lost her Blackbird at a party last week, and who actually know who Anna Wintour looks like. Back to this key line: I think he's right. It just him, he is overly sensitive, and he doesn't get it, whatever "it" is. Perhaps. Perhaps it just me; Hulk dumb. Hulk want clerk say Merry Christmas. But I’m actually quite relaxed about the matter. I don’t care if the clerks don’t say Merry Christmas. Big deal. What amuses me is the sense of annoyance I detect when I say Merry Christmas to them. Aw, you had to do and say it. Now I gotta say it back to you or you’re going to think I don’t believe in Merry Christmas. Christ! The very words have taken on a peculiar charge in the retail world, and I think that’s interesting. But again: if people use the phrase in a certain segment of a narrow island attached to the East Coast, I’m obviously talking through my hat. My tall, multi-level POPE HAT, worn for entries just like these. But still: is it possible that some people in the overculture lack an elemental understanding of what this holiday means to some? I know, I know. Madness. Bear with me. I don’t think people in the Evil Coastal Godless Baal-Loving Media hate Christianity. I’m sure some hold it in disinterested contempt, the way they view NASCAR and Simplicity dress patterns and those giant salad forks some people inexplicably used as kitchen-wall decorations. But for many – yes, the dreaded inexact “many” – religious ideas don’t register at all, so they don’t know how their actions might seem to those who take the whole God thing seriously. A perfect example was found in a recent Entertainment Weekly, which ran the annual list of up-and-comers. For Morgan Spurlock, the wonderfully named filmmaker who did the “Supersize Me” doc, they used this photo:  He’s bare-chested, arms out in a crucifixion posture, a hamburger in each hand. It’s funny ‘cause he, like, ate Big Macs for our sins! Apparently it never occurred to anyone at EW how this image might strike someone who doesn’t look at religious iconography as a handy source of photo-shot ideas. The person who came up with the idea didn’t know this would be offensive, or didn’t care. The photographer didn’t know, or didn’t care. The person who chose the photo didn’t know, or didn’t care. The editor who approved the section didn’t know, or didn’t care. In case you wonder why this might be offensive to some, it’s this: he ain’t Jesus.  Let your sins be washed away in the ketchup of the lamb! It doesn’t offend me, because my antennae aren’t set to whip back and forth on these issues: Whatever. Big surprise. But I understand why it would gall others. So at least I have some empathy, no? That was one of the points I was attempting to make in the column. I’m empathetic to the meanings of other holidays. I suspect others are equally ecumenical and forgiving. For that matter I suspect that 98.025 of the population has no trouble with Merry Christmas shouted long and loud and clear this time of the year. Why, then, do the retail giants and big corporations seem to get a frozen Joker-smile when you bring it up? Yes, I know. Macy’s says “Merry Christmas” in tiny type on their website; dandy. But Southdale, the nation’s first enclosed shopping mall, hung MERRY CHRISTMAS in six-foot tall letters in 1963. This year? Not a word. Big candles, though. If you don’t think that’s an interesting development, or wonder why it happened or what it means, fine. Blog away about adventures in bird-watching, for all I care. Note: in one of those classic little asides meant to endear him to the chic upper-left-side Mo-Dowd demographic whose uteruses have turned to something indistinguishable from papyri rescued from Herculanuem, he refers to me as a “blogger beloved in the daycare community.” Whether this is a swipe at my infantile politics or tendancy to write about my child, I don’t know. I doubt he knows anything about me beyond a few excerpts, or he wouldn’t have thought “Lilek” is the name and “Lilek’s” is possessive. But when I read that, I thought: he has cats. Everything about his work suggests that he has cats. Not that there’s anything wrong with cats. I love cats, even though I prefer dogs. But sometimes you just get the impression of a soul whose incessant pissy hauteur is best expressed at the moment when they dump a stinky disk of fish guts into the bowl and mutter something clever to the elegant creatures feasting at their feet. The fact that the cats don’t quite get what you’re saying is irrelevant. No, on some level, cats get it. Whatever "it" is. Anyway, I was wrong. He doesn’t have cats. He has ocicats. Yep. Absolutely. And I have a gogidog. Also a real child, but yawn. So obvious. |
|
|
|
.....