The cashier smiled and wished me a “merry Christmas.” I scowled back. It was the week just after Thanksgiving, and the supermarket staff were clearing away the last of the orange-and-brown remnants of Turkey Day advertising décor and replacing it with red, green, tinsel, and pine trees.
“It isn’t Christmas for another month,” I said with late-autumn frost dripping from every word. In that moment, I wondered how the management of this business even permitted its employees to wish random customers – whose beliefs and backgrounds they did not know – the blessings of the festival of the Christian God’s nativity. I also shuddered to think that, not only was I going to have to suffer four more weeks of this, it was only going to get worse.
“Oh, don’t be such a Grinch.” she said as she handed me the receipt, “everybody loves Christmas!”
“I don’t. I’m a Jew,” I growled, snatching the receipt, grabbing my bags and exiting just as the store’s music switched from “The Little Drummer Boy” to the “Carol of the Bells.”
In retrospect, I was probably a little too harsh, and my interlocutor was probably genuinely full of Christmas spirit. But I had already been drowning in the rising tide of Christmas cheer for almost a month since the last trick-or-treater had taken the last mini KitKat from the Halloween bowl, and the prospect of another four weeks of this filled me with dread.
Still, I doubtless gave her a story to tell that night about another skirmish in the War on Christmas, that myth cooked up by disgraced former Fox News talking head Bill O’Reilly two decades ago to boost ratings and advertiser revenues. The idea was that a shadowy cabal of un-American progressives and liberals had undermined core American values to the point that they had – gasp! – erased Christ from Christmas.
O’Reilly bemoaned the paucity of holiday creches in public displays, the increasingly-common practice of wishing people “happy holidays,” or offering “season’s greetings.” Over the decades, what began as a minor TV celebrity’s schtick became an authentic political cause celebre. By the time Donald Trump arrived in the White House, it had become the seasonal lightning rod of Magaism. The President was going to make Christmas and America great again. The people who bought into O’Reilly’s myth believed that they had lost something special, even sacred, and that the America that they loved had somehow become corrupted and debased by outside, “un-American” forces.
If all that sounds familiar, it should. The “War on Christmas” narrative is just another variation of the old canard of a shadowy global conspiracy that leads back to the Jews. Indeed, the equation that the “War on Christmas” draws between authentic American tradition and the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ makes explicit an exclusive Christian notion of cultural citizenship. The very idea that “everyone loves Christmas,” or that it is a “holiday for everybody” only reveals who is included in the category of “everyone.”
***
Any non-Christian can tell you about that feeling of discomfort – a slightly and not-so-slightly queasy sensation – that we get around this time of year, when our Christian friends make us listen to, and often invite us to sing along with carols exhorting us to “remember Christ our savior” or imagine “the little lord Jesus” laying down his sweet head.
Many people make an effort to find something non-Christian in Christmas to make the holiday more inclusive for themselves and their friends. We are reminded that the birthdate of a historical Jesus (assuming there was one) would have been in the late summer or early fall (when shepherds were tending their flocks), and that St. Hippolytus only settled on December 25th sometime around 230 CE, to make it coincide with the pagan solstice festivals, like the Saturnalia and the festival of Sol Invictus, crowded into Roman Party Week in late-December. So, they insist, it’s really a non-Christian winter festival!
And there are any number of social media memes offering proof that Santa Claus, Sinterklaas, Father Christmas, or whatever you want to call the jolly old elf, is really an ephemerized representation of the Norse sky god, Odin. So we should be okay, right? Christmas, as it is celebrated on December 25th in the 21st century, is simply the contemporary iteration of a universal winter festival with primordial roots!
Well… no. We only celebrate Christmas at the time of that festival today because Christianity absorbed the observances of many cultures into its practice and liturgy in its long march from a fringe cult in Judea to the hegemonic intellectual and cultural force in what would become known as Christendom. Christianity owed its success to its syncretism, its ability to incorporate ideas and rituals from diverse faiths and practices wherever it has spread. Jesus became a white dude when Christianity incorporated white dudes into its community; his birthday began to fall on the solstice when people who once worshiped a sun-god traded up for the son-of-God.
Christmas is no more “truly pagan” than the Trinity is “truly Sumerian,” or Christian messianic eschatology is “truly Jewish.” Hell, by that standard, the God of Judaism is both “truly Canaanite” (which would have surprised Abraham) and “truly Egyptian” (which would have shocked Moses). While that’s the kind of thing that Joseph Campbell and James Frazer loved ranting on about, bless their hearts, it isn’t actually relevant to the Christ in Christmas in the 21st century. The wrapping paper might have a subtle pagan-y theme to it, but the gift inside is pure Jesus.
The bottom line is that the only thing that makes Christmas a universal, secular holiday is the universalizing ambitions and arrogance of Christianity that have produced a very Christian secularism. The rhythms of the “secular” calendar march in lockstep with the Christian religious calendar. I remember, with little fondness, being the Jew in grade school who explained Chanukah to my classmates because this minor holiday, which only sometimes falls at the same time as the festival of the Nativity, was somehow “the Jewish Christmas.”
Only it clearly isn’t. Most public and economic life shuts down for Christmas, a national holiday, but not for Chanukah unless the dates coincide (and Chanukah isn’t even the kind of holiday that you would take off from work). No “secular” business, office, or institution closes for Yom Kippur, or Pesach, or Eid-al-Fitr, or Diwali. Only Christian holidays are national holidays because – non-Christians are only too-aware – this is a Christian country. And Christmas reminds us of this every year – for two months every year.
***
It can be hard to stand by when a party is going on, even if that party celebrates the birth of a God-king whose very existence, if you believe in it, denies the legitimacy of any and all competing belief systems. Christians believe that Jesus was born the savior of all humanity and that salvation is only possible through his grace. The often-quoted John 14:6 is pretty clear: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” The Apostle’s Creed, shared by virtually all Christian denominations, is clear that Jesus is coming back “to judge the living and the dead,” not just Christians. There is no grey area here: Christians are right, everyone else is wrong, and you’re going hell for it. But hey, let’s party!
Many non-Christians do join the party, but rarely without misgivings. The vast majority of Americans are Christians, so most of our friends are Christians; many of us are married to, or in committed relationships with Christians. It is a difficult party to ignore, so why not just go with the flow and make the best of it? After all, ugly sweaters, candy canes, and eggnog can be huge fun! We’ll just ignore all that gloria in excelsis deo stuff and party. In fact, much of the pleasure we derive in embracing some of the less-blatantly Christian elements of Christmas lies in tuning out the dissonance that comes from being an outsider in a Christian world.
I get it: it sucks to be an outsider, Everyone wants to belong and the calculus is that this is a way to belong without fully assimilating – and disappearing into the Christian mass like the pagans who gave us the Christmas tree in the first place. So we call it a “Chanukah bush,” sing “Oy to the world” like the good sports that we are and, like a Jew in a Chinese restaurant, we pretend that we really don’t know what kind of meat the spareribs are made of.
This is what makes the claim of a “War on Christmas” so absurd. The position of Christmas in America is utterly unassailable. Non-Christians are subdued and pacified to the point that most of us are not only content to go along, as if we ever really had a choice in the matter, but are often happy to make substantial contributions to America’s Christmas traditions. Hell, there wouldn’t even be American Christmas traditions without the efforts of people like Irving Berlin, Sammy Cahn, and Johnny Marks.
So no, there is no War on Christmas, and wishing someone a “happy holiday” isn’t going to erode the Christian hegemony in America by a micron. We all know what holiday you’re talking about. It’s kind of hard to ignore.
There is, however, a War on Chanukah – and on every other non-Christian practice and observance – in America, and it is a ruthless war of conquest and colonization.
***
Chanukah is unique among Jewish holidays. It is not mandated in the Torah like Yom Kippur, Pesach, Shavuot and the other major holidays, it does not have a scriptural basis like Purim, nor is it a day of mourning and fasting like Tisha b’Av and the Fast of Gedaliah. Alone among Jewish holidays, Chanukah is observed in the home, rather than in Shul and, apart from the miracle of oil, does not really have much to do with God or divine intervention.
Rather, the holiday commemorates the heroic resistance of the Jews in the second century CE to a vast hegemonic power that sought to impose its beliefs and religious practices upon us. The real history is somewhat more complex than this, of course, but the story that we have told since before the birth of Christianity – indeed, in John 10:22-23, Jesus is actually in the Temple observing Chanukah himself – tells of the time we fought back against our oppressors and defended our way of life. It is the celebration of the strength and resilience that has ensured our survival for four millennia. We light the chanukiah for eight nights and let the candles burn in the window as a defiant message to an often hostile world that we are still here; the inmates of the Warsaw Ghetto celebrated Chanukah and lit the festive lights as a gesture of hope that they – and our people collectively – would endure even the Shoah.
So, on the first night of Chanukah this year, I joyfully scrolled through Facebook, looking at all the pictures my friends had posted of their menorot shining defiantly and hopefully in their windows as a signal to the world that we are still here and we will endure.
But then it became clear that December 10 is also the night when many, if not most, Christians erect their Christmas trees. Before long the Chanukah lights were dimmed in a tide of posts of tinsel and pine. I shouted aloud: “For God’s sake, after six weeks pf Christmas already, can’t we have one fucking night to ourselves?!”
The answer is “no,” of course. This is a Christian world in which we are guests, sometimes welcomed, but often merely suffered. It is something that we are always conscious of, whether we are willing to admit it to ourselves, so we try to fit in, harmonize with the seasonal melodies, and feel a frisson of anxiety if we don’t.
One friend asked “Does anyone else feel really uncomfortable about Chanukah gelt?” Chanukah gelt is foil-covered chocolate coins, the symbolic token of the gifts of money Jews in the European ghettos furtively exchanged in lieu of presents, which could be taxed by our Christian oppressors. My friend felt discomfort, however, that Chanukah gelt simply reinforced those old antisemitic myths of Jews and money. How does it look from the outside?
Yet, that very question is a surrender, an abdication to the colonizer who would presume to define us. And whether that colonizer is Antiochus Epiphanes, the ruler of the Seleucid Empire, or the vast hegemonic weight of Christian America during what has become the twelve weeks of Christmas, our answer should be the same: We must resist, reclaim Jerusalem, and rededicate the Temple for ourselves.