Merry Christmas

People often believe that December 25 marks the end of Christmas while, in fact, it’s just the beginning. What many people regard as Christmas is really the month long season of Advent (the Beginning) which looks forward to Christmas and the start of another liturgical year. Christmas begins on December 25 and ends on January 5, hence the twelve days of Christmas. So I thought early this morning, while the rest of the family is still asleep, might be a good time to look at Christmas from a religious perspective rather than a consumer one.

Complaints about Christmas being overly commercialized go all the way back to the era following the First World War. For example Santa Claus today is depicted as wearing a red and white suite with a black belt and black boots rather than the earlier green jacket and tan pants. Why? Because red, white and black are the Cocoa Cola colors. For years Cocoa Cola had a Christmas billboard campaign featuring Santa Claus drinking a Coke and wishing everyone a Merry Christmas. And, of course, he was wearing a suite made from the company colors. During the thirties some grinches noted those were also the colors of Hitler’s Nazi party, and, I suppose, the “war on Christmas” was launched.

Criticism of the commercialization of Christmas reached its zenith with the 1958 release of Stan Freberg’s “Green Chri$tma$”, a biting satire about the season built around the story of a greedy and obtuse advertising executive. Since then it’s been all down hill, and half a century later people can’t understand how all this religious stuff has managed to intrude into our national Happy Holiday spending spree. And maybe that’s not such a bad turn of events for those of us who just want to celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace, and hope the new year will be the year when there truly will be peace on earth and goodwill toward men. We have our HOLY DAY back. (How long will it take the Happy Holiday crowd to figure this out? Remember Season’s Greetings?)

All of us at these web sites wish you a Merry Christmas, and our Jewish readers a Happy Hanukkah, a holiday commemorating freedom from oppression and occupation by a brutal empire. Together these seasons remind us that we have much to be thankful for.