Stores are trivializing Christmas

5th December 2011   ·   0 Comments

By Fr. Jerome LeDoux
Contributing Columnist

“A Winter Wonderland” playing in a supermarket on October 22? Although I was just three hours into the nine-hour drive to New Orleans, had fatigue set in, blurring my mental clarity? Alas, upon further listening, it really was “A Winter Wonderland” playing. Adding insult to injury, the store played “Silver Bells” right behind it.

Several days later, as if not to be outdone by competitors, another supermarket was playing Christmas carols. In the not-too-distant past, commercial caroling began only after Thanksgiving had come and gone. Gradually, the caroling sneaked in just after Halloween. Now it has breached All-Hallows-Eve by God knows how many days.

As all bureaucracies, supermarkets are unfeeling, venal, commercial and clumsy in their approach to eager customers. Worse, their blatantly secular commercialization of Christmas music trivializes all that is holy and sacred about the season.

It’s a huge irony and a big laugh at their expense that the secularists simply cannot get the Great Birthday out of theirs or anyone else’s system. For instance, the word Christmas pops out despite all their stratagems to suppress it. “Silver Bells! Silver Bells! It’s Christmas time in the city!” The season’s sheer magic is unavoidable, irresistible.

The secularists continue to stumble over their own language, such as saying “Happy Holidays!” in order to avoid saying “Merry Christmas!” or — God forbid — “Happy Holy Day!” Won’t they ever realize that holiday is just a derivative of holy day?

In their blundering haste to eradicate all vestiges of the holy and sacred from our language and culture, the secular progressives forget how deeply embedded sacred talk is in the very fiber of our culture and everyday life. Will they stop saying “Good-bye!” when they hear that good-bye had morphed from “God be with you!” by 1573?

Are they annoyed or disgusted when football play-by-play men or color men talk with great fascination about a game-ending Hail Mary pass about to be attempted? This is not a rare reference, but rather a vital part of the conversation toward the end of any close game where a losing team is positioning itself for a desperation shot at winning.

A variation of the Hail Mary in football but more especially in basketball is, “He threw up a prayer from half court!” Hard-core secular progressives must find no peace any place they go, least of all in sports where sportscasters are always looking for the most colorful and descriptive language. “They don’t stand a prayer,” is another favorite.

The Immaculate Reception, a deflected pass caught by running back Franco Harris on December 23, 1972 gave the Pittsburgh Steelers a 13-7 victory over the Oakland Raiders. A neologism coined by sportscaster Myron Cope, Immaculate Reception must hurt secular progressives as much as Hail Mary does, and for the same reason of course.

A similar dilemma about Christmas terminology awaits secular progressives. The Great Birthday and its multifaceted celebration are so closely ingrained in our families and extended families that almost anything we say about it has religious overtones in our culture and traditions. Thus, the centuries-old War On Christmas is a cultural war.

Epiphany, a term originating from the Magi’s visit to the newborn Jewish child in Bethlehem, is a big, oft-used word on TV, on the radio in the written media and everyday conversation. As a matter of fact, each of us experiences one or the other epiphany in life.

A fist on our chest, we even say the Latin mea culpa, meaning my fault or my bad.

Merry Xmas has been used by some to get around Christmas, not realizing that X was understood by the early Christians as an abbreviation of the Greek word Χριστός that means Christ. Ac­tually, the ab­breviation accents the word all the more powerfully.

Amendment 1 of the U.S. Constitution says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Though used to prove “separation of church and state,” this amendment says nothing of the kind, the ACLU and Americans United For Separation of Church and State notwithstanding.

Besides, Christians don’t want to hog the Holy Days spotlight. Other folks may make it as inclusive as they want, displaying the Hanukkah menorah, the Muslim star and crescent, and even the atheist Christmas signs and billboards that contrast the sacred.

This article was originally published in the December 5, 2011 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper