Christmas vs. holiday: how did America, a nominally Christian nation, get to the point that a cheerful "Merry Christmas" is seen as intolerant and our gifts are placed under "holiday trees"?

"The President and Mrs. Reagan extend to you their best wishes for a joyous Christmas and a peaceful New Year." In 1982, that was the message appearing on President Reagan's Christmas card to thousands of GOP faithful. In 1983, the "greeting" changed: "The President and Mrs. Reagan extend to you their warmest wishes for happiness at the holidays and throughout the new year." Thus did the Reagan White House stop sending Christmas cards and start sending "holiday greetings."

This semantic change in the official greeting from the White House, probably unnoticed at the time, was not the beginning of the "War on Christmas." That war arises from the enmity to all things Christian among atheists, civil libertarians, leftists, and public school unions, as well as the political, cultural, and financial elites, who abhor anything restraining mass consumerism and "individual liberty." Simply put, it's God vs. Mammon.

Manifestations of the war against Christmas abound, including the American Civil Liberties Union's legal war against "unconstitutional" manger scenes depicting the Nativity in the public square, and even renaming Christmas trees "holiday trees," again, on the public square.

And this war extends beyond Christmas. In public schools, Easter break is "Spring break." Kwanzaa and the Muslim holy days of Ramadan are studied and recognized. Meanwhile, Jesus' birth, the central event dividing, chronologically, the ancient world from the new, has gone down the memory hole: B.C.E. (Before the Common Era) and C.E. (Common Era) have replaced B.C. (Before Christ) and A.D. (Anno Domini--The Year of Our Lord).

Most Americans are familiar with the war-on-Christmas stories. They react to them as one would expect: with anger and amazement. They want to "put Christ back in Christmas." They want everyone to remember the "reason for the season."

Recognizing this anger and fretting about profits, Wal-Mart, Target, and other retailers are again using the word "Christmas" in advertising and store displays. Wal-Mart instructed clerks to wish customers "Merry Christmas," as opposed to the drab secularisms, "Season's Greetings" or "Happy Holidays." And some municipalities such as Milwaukee are once again decorating Christmas trees as opposed to "holiday" trees.

Still, the question remains: how is it the warriors against Christmas succeeded so famously, and what role did Christians play in their success?

American Christmas

In 2001, writing in Chronicles magazine, church historian Aaron Wolf detailed the history of Christmas in America and how the modern celebration became what it is.

Wolf reported that the war on Christmas began long before the ACLU filed its first lawsuit. The Puritans were anti-Christmas Christians, he observed, who rejected the "organic incarnational understanding" of Christianity--the Son of God becoming man--and banned celebrating Christmas in Massachusetts until 1681.

As Wolf, libertarian economist Murray Rothbard, and others have observed, Puritanism eventually devolved into Unitarianism, which rejected the Incarnation in fact and gave birth to the "reason for the season" that so many Americans now understand: a time of material giving and good deeds. "By 1842," Wolf wrote, "a new interpretation of the holiday was in place."

Wolf and other historians trace the imposition of the liberal spirit on Christmas to Charles Dickens, the Unitarian author of A Christmas Carol:

   I have always thought of Christmas
   time, when it has come round--apart
   from the veneration due to its sacred
   name and origin, if anything belonging
   to it can be apart from that--as
   a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable,
   pleasant time: the only time I
   know of, in the long calendar of the
   year, when men and women seem
   by one consent to open their shut-up
   hearts freely.... And therefore, uncle,
   though it has never put a scrap of gold
   or silver in my pocket, I believe that
   it has done me good, and will do me
   good; and I say, God bless it!

These words, Wolf reminded readers, come from Fred, the nephew of Ebeneezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. Everyone familiar with the story should also be familiar with what central Character it lacks: Jesus Christ.

Two more interesting facts about Christmas: Santa Claus is a Unitarian invention spun off the very real, heroic, and virtuous St. Nicholas. A Unitarian penned "Jingle Bells," a delightful tune, Wolf observed, devoid of Christian intent or meaning.

Obviously, nothing is wrong with gift-giving or performing good deeds, either at Christmastime or during the rest of the year. Feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and visiting the sick are among the corporal works of mercy. But Jesus, whom Christians believe is the Greatest Gift to mankind, is either window-dressing for Christmas or ignored altogether.

What We Believe

Many Americans, including many Christian Americans, have swallowed the modern meaning whole. Forgetting the Incarnation, they summon Dickensian ghosts to tell them what Christmas is "about": gift giving, secular charity, "peace and good will," family and friends, sitting by the Yule log, kissing under the mistletoe.

Yet these abstractions don't say much about what Christians believe or ought to believe. This isn't to say that Americans don't know, on a tacit, intellectual level, why we celebrate Christmas. But it is to say Christ no longer animates the celebration. Christmas has become a secularized holiday as opposed to a Christian Holy Day.

Twentieth-century popular music and films, which the cultural and financial elites offered for the "holiday season," cemented the secularization. Many of the singers who popularized such tunes as "White Christmas" (Bing Crosby) and "Let It Snow" (Dean Martin) were Christians. Yet they, along with the troubadours who sang "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and "Frosty the Snowman" (Gene Autry) and "The Christmas Song" (Nat King Cole), weren't caroling about Christmas. They were warbling about winter.

This celebration of a secular winter respite was a profound change in keeping with the "new meaning" of Christmas. It is why, for instance, in the 1960s' "classic" Rudolf animation for television, Santa Claus laments that Christmas might be "canceled" because a horrible blizzard smothers "Christmastown" on Christmas Eve. Christmas canceled? Only if it's a holiday dependent upon good weather.

Along with Rudolf and Frosty, Americans watch How The Grinch Stole Christmas!, Dr. Suess' Christless contribution to holiday cinematic fare. Again, The Grinch offers viewers the "Christmas-is-canceled" theme when the hideous Grinch steals the gifts and Christmas vittles from Whoville. Surely, when he takes their baubles and "roast beast," he believes, the Whovillians won't celebrate Christmas. But alas, the residents of Whoville know the "true meaning" of Christmas. It is the same "meaning" Scrooge discovered on his nocturnal adventures with the three ghosts.

Another yuletide obligation is watching Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, starring Jimmy Stewart, who, like the singers mentioned above, was no enemy of Christmas. Yet, despite the film's few Christian moments, what the cultural cognoscenti call a "classic" is "not," as one reviewer pointed out at IMDB.com, "a film about religion." Instead, it is yet another Dickensian allegory. It contemplates "hope, truth and the depth of the human heart." George Bailey, the archetypal, unfulfilled Everyman, finds the "meaning of life" on Christmas Eve, but not through the Incarnate Lord. Instead, an angel shows him what his town would have been like if he hadn't been around. Christians should wonder what life would be like if Christ hadn't been born.

One of the better Christmas television programs is a Charlie Brown Christmas, wherein Linus explains "the meaning of Christmas" by reciting the Nativity narrative from the Gospel According to Luke. Unsurprisingly, television executives were unhappy with the idea. According to USA Today, the executives at CBS complained to Peanuts' creator Charles Schultz, "Look, you can't read from the Bible on network television." On seeing the film, they thought Schultz had "ruined" Charlie Brown. Schultz's amusing denunciation of materialism surfaces when Lucy says she wants "real estate" for Christmas, and Sally, in a letter to Santa Claus, asks for "tens and twenties." Linus offers the corrective Lucan Lesson.

Point is, nothing is wrong with Christians singing "White Christmas" or watching It's a Wonderful Life or Charlie Brown, if they understand what they are singing and watching, and don't substitute this secular entertainment for the Incarnation as the central historical and spiritual truth about Christmas. But how often do Christians sing "Silent Night" versus "White Christmas"? How much time is spent sitting in front of a television set, watching the Grinch, versus the time spent kneeling before a manger scene, contemplating the mystery of the Incarnation?

The honest answer to this question shows that popular culture has transformed the meaning of Christmas. No longer a prayerful contemplation and celebration of the birth of Christ, it has become a solemnization of saccharine, gooey warmth in wintertime: roasting chestnuts, gifts under the tree, and snuggling by the fire.

For Christians, the difference is hardly inconsequential. Christ was born, serious Christians believe, to die in agony on the Cross for the sins of mankind. Of course, everyone claims to know and understand this, but our annual rites and revelries belie the claim of profound understanding. Many Americans, even American Christians, mistakenly believe Christmas is "about" that "kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time," as Dickens put it, "when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely," meaning the secular "peace and goodwill" that percolated from Dickens' literary brain pan.

Christmas isn't "about" any of these things. It is "about" One Thing, that sacred day 2,000 years ago when a Babe was born in Bethlehem, not to offer Capra's wonderful life on Earth, but to offer Christ's Eternal Life in Heaven. On Christmas Day, Christians must ask which life they are contemplating.

R. Cort Kirkwood has been writing about American politics and culture for more than 20 years.