The ‘War on Christmas’ Is Boring – By Alice B. Lloyd (weeklystandard.com) / Dec 18 2017
Americans really don’t care about a “war on Christmas” anymore.
Per a recent Pew survey, more than half of U.S. adults believe the Christian trappings of Christmas—crèches, crosses, magi chasing stars—are less prominent now than they were in the past. Meanwhile, 30 percent say the slippage hasn’t increased, and a mere 12 percent claim to see a reverse trend.
The majority—56 percent, precisely—may be onto something. A declining number of professed Christians believe in the historical reality of the nativity cycle. Of the virgin birth, the annunciation to the shepherds, the adoration of the magi, and the laying of the Christ child in a manger, respondents find the the manger to bethe most believable. (Just 75 percent profess to buy that bit, down from 81 percent only four years ago.)
Since 2013’s survey to now, 4 four percent fewer Americans say they celebrate Christmas as a religious holiday, but a consistent 9-in-10 answered that they do indeed celebrate in some fashion.
More meaningful perhaps, is the apathetic quarter of surveyed Americans who admitted: Sure, Christmas gets less Christian every year, but who really cares? Of the 56 percent who see Christ’s incarnation fading from the yuletide scene, nearly half don’t mind at all: 25 percent answered that “the religious parts of Christmas are now emphasized less” but added that the perceptible decline “does not bother me.”
And 52 percent, up from 45 in 2013, don’t care a whit whether store employers and door-greeters welcome shoppers during the holiday season, for instance. And, hey, they have a point. What does it matter, really?
Sure, the Incarnation is a fairly serious deal. As a metaphysical flashpoint in the history of humankind, it really can’t be topped. Plus, whether you take it as gospel or not, the Lucan Nativity is prize reading for this or any time of year.
But most of the comfort and joy men and women look forward to—to break up the cold hard months of dreary midwinter, when it’s already dark by the end of the work day and the world has a head cold—is a more primordial, irreligious impulse. It’s when Romans celebrated Saturnalia.
It’s the holiday inheritance of a winter-solstice-adjacent festival of gift-giving, drinking, and merrymaking that predates Jesus’s birthday by millennia: It’s also when animists the world over have supplicated to the sun since man first managed to measure time by the lengthening of the day.
Don’t take it from me. Take it from Mencken: The Baltimore Sun’s seasonal tradition of pointing out the true meaning of Christmas began with his stoking the “War on Christmas” with proof of its pagan roots. Our call to seasonal revelry is really rooted in a baser calendrical habit than the church could ever ordain. And, best of all, a fattening percentage of Americans really don’t care either way.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/the-war-on-christmas-is-boring/article/2010875
PB/TK – Perhaps people are realizing the hypocrisy of the War on Christmas in the US. We live in a consumer nation. We still believe in “keeping up with Jones'” We still believe in buying anything at a discount. And I’ll bet people have 10x more Santas and Snowmen decorating their house then a manger scene under their tree. Well that manger probably has a Lionel train passing by
