By Wednesday, as
Chicagoist.com noted acidly in an item it headed
City Spins Like Dreidel on Christkindlmarket Display,
the Office of Special Events, "[p]roving once again
that there’s no hole that can’t be made deeper with a
few more shovels," was in retreat, claiming that the
ads would be "too commercial" ("Too commercial
for an event that is also sponsored by the Hard Rock
Hotel,
Mercedes-Benz and Lufthansa".)
My guess is that,
if this spiral of silence continues to reverse, The
Nativity Story ads may well be restored.
Indeed, the War
Against Christmas 2006 has begun with a number of such
small
victories. Patrick Arsenault, who maintains his own
War On Christmas
website, reports:
"Target
Corporation began adding a ‘Merry Christmas’
greeting to
the end of its seasonal TV ads, and it continues to
do so in its 2006 commercials. The word ‘Christmas’ is
also abundant in its stores and on its website, where it
refers to ‘Christmas decorations’, ‘Christmas
trees’, and more. Although the term ‘holiday’ is still
used, it is used interchangeably with Christmas.
"In November 2006,
Wal-Mart Stores announced that it would be officially
"endorsing" Christmas for its 2006 promotions, citing
that fact that it would have several TV ads mentioning
Christmas and showing Nativity scenes, and that
merchandise and promotions labeled "holiday" in previous
years
would be changed to "Christmas" by 60%. Wal-Mart
said this year will be an "in-your-face" Christmas
campaign (see current
proof on Wal-Mart’s
website). Bravo, Wal-Mart!
"Examples of other
retailers claiming to acknowledge Christmas: Kohl's,
Macy's, Sears Holdings (Sears and Kmart), and Target.
But, Arsenault
notes,
"Many retailers are
still using the ‘Holiday’
terminology that has been politically correct for years;
Best Buy, Office Depot, Staples, Lowe's, and many
other retail and online giants.
Worse, he
continues,
"The United States
Postal Service recently updated its website to offer a
"Holiday" section at which includes some
Christmas-related imagery, yet essentially no reference
to Christmas even under the most obvious circumstances.
For example, it offers "
Shipping deadlines for December 25 delivery" with
absolutely NO mention of Christmas. Also, in the
"Holiday Gift Center" page, there are stamps for the
Muslim holiday Eid, as well as for Hanukkah and
Kwanzaa on the front page graphic, but the one (1)
Christmas
Madonna stamp is at the bottom with the other three
being at the top—i.e. highlighted over the Christmas
stamp. There are less than 0.5%
MUSLIMS IN AMERICA! Believing Christians compose
80%!!! This really made me mad."
So we have only
just begun to fight.
This is VDARE.COM’s
seventh War Against Christmas competition. And its
antecedents lie in the distant past: I first
persuaded John O’Sullivan to run a War Against
Christmas Competition in
National Review in the mid-1990s—no doubt
contributing to his firing as Editor, after which it was
promptly dropped,
along with the cause of immigration reform, not
coincidentally.
Looking through our
now-considerable archive (check the
links at the top of this article), I am impressed
how much resistance has developed to the Khristmaskampf—and
how
fanatical the Christophobes remain. What normal
woman, for example, would call the headquarters of the
McDonald’s hamburger chain to complain that a
restaurant in Raleigh, NC, was displaying a sign saying
"Jesus is the Reason for The Season," as happened
last year.
Yet I am quite sure
that the majority of Americans, confronted with this
snarling fanaticism, just want to run away. This is why
cranks rule the world.
At VDARE.COM, we
crank back.
This clash between
the American majority and a militant minority of
Christophobic cranks had already become explicit
when I announced the winner of our 2004 competition and
predicted that, in 2005, they would get "nasty."
Of course, they
always were nasty. But in fact, the 2005 clash
took a slightly different turn. In 2005, the War Against
Christmas entered the mainstream, with a number of
Christian groups and
Mainstream Media commentators waking up to it. The
response of the Christophobes:
-
Deny everything (nobody here but us
Christophobes);
-
Blame it all on Fox TV’s
Bill O’Reilly.
As I write this,
every one of the
results for "War Against Christmas" on Google
News takes one or other tack, often both.
O’Reilly irritates
a lot of people, including conservatives (although he
was perfectly fine to me when he
interviewed me about my education book
The Worm In The Apple). So a number of people
who should know better have been repelled from resisting
the Kristmaskampf, including, as I
said reproachfully last year, my old friend Lew
Rockwell of
LewRockwell.com, undercutting his
heroic defense of The Passion Of The Christ
against the same cultural commissars. (We’re watching
you in 2006, Lew!)
So it’s worth
noting that our concern for this issue is not just
crankery (not that that would stop us). What is under
attack in the War Against Christmas is ultimately the
nation itself, as presently constituted. Ironically, one
of the most eloquent exponents of this insight in the
British context is the Pakistani-born Anglican Bishop of
Rochester in England,
Michael Nazir-Ali, who seems to have received
remarkably little attention in this country. Recently he
told an interviewer:
"I have come to the
view that the question now is not that of defending the
place of this Church, but the very basis on which this
nation was founded.
"Almost everything you
touch in British culture, whether it's art, literature
or the language itself has been shaped by the
Judaeo-Christian tradition, by the
Bible, by the
church's worship and belief. But this whole idea of
a multi-faith society. Well, if you mean just that there
are people of different faiths in Britain, that's one
thing, that's obvious. But if you go on to say that this
means there is such a thing as undifferentiated faith,
which somehow must be provided for—that's a
completely different matter. I think we are now
moving from one to the other and there are all sorts of
dangers in this. I think it
[multiculturalism]
was a mistake. It was based on a confusion between civic
morality and theological pluralism. Of course we have to
recognize difference; of course people have the right to
worship in the way they wish to in their own homes.
"But you need much
more than that if you are going to be a cohesive nation.
You need some sort of subscription to a common vision,
to shared values, and that has been neglected, not so
much because of the presence of other faiths but because
of the
spiritual and moral vacuum that has come to be at
the heart of British society." [There's
a moral vacuum in Britain and if we don't return to our
Christian values, we may not be able to resist Islam,
by Dominic Lawson, Daily Mail, November 5,
2006]
"Happy Holidays"
is the war-cry of multicultural undifferentiated
faith—and a spiritual, moral and national vacuum.
This just in from
the frontline of the War Against Christmas—reported by
VDARE.COM
contributor J. Paige Straley:
"I recently wrote
Jack’s Christmas, a pleasant twelve-stanza poem
about Jack the Bunny getting home for Christmas. Fairly
innocuous stuff, you would think.
"I sold Jack as
a Christmas card last year at a couple of major Carolina
Christmas shows and everyone liked it. This made me
think that if it was made up as a book, with good
illustrations, it might work well as a promotion or a
store-traffic incentive for a large retailer. I set my
sights on Harris-Teeter, a
large grocer in the Carolinas, and got an
appointment to see Mr. Kevin Crainer
[send him
mail] who handles many of their promotions.
"When I got in his
office, Crainer took one look at my beautiful little
book and told me that, aside from any considerations of
content or quality, HT could not use it for a store
promotion because of that
word, ‘Christmas’, on the front cover.
Disappointed, I left.
"When Peter Brimelow
asked me to write this up, I decided to call
Harris-Teeter again in the interests of careful
reporting. Mr. Crainer would not talk to me after I
told him why I called. He referred me to Harris-Teeter’s
Public Relations person, Jennifer Panetta. [
Send
her mail] She said that, although it was the
individual employee’s decision whether to greet with a
‘Merry Christmas’, the company uses ‘Happy Holidays’ in
their public communications to encompass the span from
Thanksgiving through Christmas. Ms. Panetta did not
recall when HT changed from ‘Merry Christmas’ to ‘Happy
Holidays’, or, indeed, if there were ever such a
change.
"Ms. Panetta was clear
that HT uses ‘Happy Holidays’ for reasons of mass appeal
and to avoid upsetting any customers.
"She would not give me
a direct contact number or email when I requested it at
the end of my telephone interview. [Ask
the CEO of Harris-Teeter, Fred J. Morganthall II, why
not here:
fmorganthall@harristeeter.com]
"The news here is not
that Harris-Teeter refused my book, but rather that in
modern retailing the highest holiday of
Christianity and
Western Civilization can no longer be mentioned by
name. Just who are these customers who are so
intolerant they cannot bear the very sight of the word
‘Christmas’?"
This year we’ll
give an autographed copy of
Alien Nation, a bottle of champagne and a
copy of Jack’s Christmas to the reader who
reports to us the most outrageous attempt to abolish
Christmas.
…and a Happy New
Year!
Peter Brimelow, editor of
VDARE.COM and author of the much-denounced
Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration
Disaster (Random House -
1995) and
The Worm in the Apple (HarperCollins - 2003)
