Silent Night and Day

More coming tomorrow. Snow, I mean. My old bones tell me we’re getting an inch or two more snow.



That’s a lie, by the way.
My bones are indeed old, but they’re as surprised by the weather as I am most of the time. I get my weather off the radio and the internet these days, and those portents agree that it’ll probably snow tomorrow.

It looks very much as if our White Christmas is secure for 2007. Or “White Holiday,” as they say nowadays. I suppose singers make it, “White Season,” so it’ll scan. Anything to avoid the embarrassing, shocking word, “Christmas,” containing, as it does, the foul, profane syllable, “cris,” which must be kept at all costs from the ears of our children. (Or your children, anyway. I’ve done my bit for carbon neutrality and the maintenance of the gene pool by keeping my DNA to myself. No need to thank me. Just send a present.)

I’ve noticed there’s been some uproar from Christian groups over the Christmas advertising of the Kohl’s department store chain. The Kohl’s commercials (which star a very attractive woman who’s got a sort of Terri Hatcher thing going, I couldn’t help noticing) feature trappings and symbols that look Christmas-y in a generic, non-sectarian sort of way, but the music they use (to one’s amazement once one realizes it) is Cole Porter’s “De-Lovely,” hitherto never considered a trademark of the season.

All in all I disapprove. But I can’t help noting a certain irony in the situation.

Because I’m old, as mentioned above, and I can remember back in the 50s and 60s, when all the stores had Christmas sales, and Christmas decorations, and they played Christmas carols over the loudspeakers—and some of them even had crèches in their display windows.

And you know what? Christian leaders hated it. You’d hear it in their sermons, and read it in their letters to the editor. “Christmas is a holy festival of the Faith!” they’d say. “How dare these merchandisers hijack this blessed season for sordid gain!”

Which should be a lesson to all of us to be careful what we ask for.

Because the merchandisers have now done just what we wanted them to. They divorced their business entirely from our religious festival.

And we’re not happy at all with the result.

2 thoughts on “Silent Night and Day”

  1. There’s probably a name for this kind of thing, this knee-jerk reaction to things in the world. It’s thoughtless, just like the calls for boycotting The G. Compass movie. Haven’t we learned calling for movie boycotts doesn’t work?

  2. I think there’s a game Screwtape’s real-life counterpart likes to play.

    It goes like this:

    Let Christians see the that the world is not, in fact, made of purely pious Christians.

    Then convince them the only answer is to yell, possibly by idolizing the past.

    I’m not sure how much evil it does in the long run, but if *I* were a demon, this would be the type of thing I would find endlessly amusing.

    (But then I’d probably get demoted for wasting my time–effeciency always struck me as a particularly diabolic virtue.)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.