Over the course of my life, I have witnessed ongoing efforts to corrupt Christmas.
Retailers gleefully distort this holiest of holidays for Christians into a period of frenzied spending by consumers. Even more irritating is that this blitz of marketing to induce shopping seems to start earlier every year.
I recall the lack of any Christmas decorations or commercials until the week of Thanksgiving . During the past several years, I have been overwhelmed by the large number of Christmas decorations and other related merchandise in stores at the end of September. Ironically, at the same time, those same stores refer to those items as “holiday,” “seasonal” or some other vague, politically correct term.
Their employees are told to use nondescript and hollow phrases like “Happy Holidays” or “Season’s Greetings.” The retailers deliberately refuse to acknowledge the fact that the vast majority of shoppers are specifically buying in preparation to celebrate Christmas. The retailers take advantage of tens of millions of misguided Americans preoccupied with gift buying and decorating without even admitting that the retailers’ enormous financial windfalls can be attributed to the celebration of the birth of Christ.
While corporations are exploiting Christmas for their own self-centered financial gains, others are attempting to minimize and even usurp the holiday. Some groups feel that they must overexaggerate the importance of other observances in order to compete with Christmas’ high level of prominence. These same groups engage in deliberate actions to draw attention away from Christmas.
The dubious history behind their replacement holidays must be revealed.
Hanukkah appears to be the most familiar of the holidays whose supporters have been demanding media coverage and public attention. Although this holiday originated several centuries before Christ, it was never considered one of the most important Jewish holidays. It is so relatively new when compared to other Jewish holidays such as Passover that the scriptures documenting the story of the events leading to Hanukkah, the Book of Maccabees, did not appear in the Hebrew Bibles used by many Jewish congregations around the world until the past few decades.
As Christmas grew more important and pervasive during the previous and present centuries, some Jews felt the need to celebrate a holiday of their own at the same time of year. It is ridiculous to overestimate the importance of Hanukkah in order to compete with Christmas. Christians in the United States, Israel and elsewhere do not overstate the importance of the Feast of the Assumption of Mary in August or any saint’s feast day to have their own celebration at the same time of year as Rosh Hashanah. I realize that Hanukkah is a legitimate holiday but no Jew should feel compelled to trumpet this relatively minor holiday to draw attention away from one of Christianity’s most important holidays.
An effort to usurp Christmas began in 1966 with the fabrication of Kwanzaa. Maulana Karenga, a professor of black studies at California State University at Long Beach, contrived a baseless period of seven days for the celebration of the African heritage of black Americans. He touted his new “holiday” as a chance for black Americans to learn about and celebrate their African roots. He mandated that this new “holiday” take place amid Christmas and New Year’s Day. There was no historical precedent for a Pan-African harvest festival at the end of December.
Nevertheless, he chose the week of the most prominent Christian holiday in the Western hemisphere for his newly “discovered” observance. He introduced a candleholder with seven candles that very suspiciously and unimaginatively resembles a menorah used during Hanukkah. He openly revealed his Marxist beliefs with the choice of themes for those seven days such as “collective work” and “cooperative economics.” Karenga implemented rules related the giving of “proper” gifts for Kwanzaa. Such evidence truly indicates that he intended to replace Christmas with Kwanzaa.
Karenga brushed aside historical realities when he determined what symbols would be associated with his fabricated celebration. His decision to use Swahili terms for aspects of this newly created “holiday” shows his ignorance of or desire to obscure the history and lineage of black Americans. The overwhelming majority of blacks sent as slaves to the areas which became United States came from western Africa. They did not speak Swahili nor did their languages belong to the same linguistic family. The West African languages are as different from each other as are English and Japanese. Additionally, his choice of corn as an important symbol of Kwanzaa is also dubious. Corn never existed in Africa until the nineteenth century and only after Europeans brought the plant there during colonization of the continent. His desire to racially segregate celebrations in late December outweighed any effort to be historically accurate.
A more recent attempt by Christmas bashers to detract from the holiday is the Winter Solstice. Some Pagans have filed and have won court cases that have led to the removal of all Christian images in schools and public displays. Retailers have bowed to pressure by militant Pagans and stopped using decorations associated with the Biblical stories related to the birth of Christ. Nativity scenes, crosses and decorations featuring angels and other Christian images on decorated trees have been replaced by images associated with Paganism such as mistletoe and the sun or simply secular like snowmen and bells. Children in schools and adults in office parties are forbidden to sing any carols which refer to the birth of Christ. I wonder how many years will pass before I see Pagans decorating evergreen trees with bloody intestines of their enemies, as was their tradition in the pre-Christian era.
In conclusion, I ask all those to whom the following does not apply to ignore the following statement. For those readers who do cherish the significance of this upcoming holiest of days, I wish you a merry Christmas.
John LaFleur, State News community columnist, can be reached at johnclafleur@lycos.com.
