“Poor Elijah’s Almanack” is written by Peter Berger of Mount Holly, who taught English and history for 30 years.
It’s been half a century since Poor Elijah first spent Christmas Eve with Ebenezer Scrooge. Even though he’s an English teacher and therefore expected to prefer Dickensian prose, my friend is heart-and-soul partial to the 1951 movie version of “A Christmas Carol.”
In the old days, when televisions came with antennas, he could only hope a local station would air it sometime between late Christmas Eve and early Christmas morning. Here in the age of streaming, he could probably catch it at his convenience on his Apple watch, provided he had one, which he predictably doesn’t.
He did, however, pick up a DVD at the local video store, when there were local video stores, so now he can watch it whenever he wants. It even offers a choice between black-and-white or glorious colorized, but being an old-fashioned kind of guy, Poor Elijah prefers Scrooge in traditional Christmas gray at traditional Christmas time.
Anyway, early in the story, before Scrooge sees the light, his nephew drops by to spread a little Christmas cheer. Scrooge replies that if he had his way, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled in his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.”
When Dickens wrote his story in 1843, you didn’t need a footnote to figure out that Scrooge was the villain in the scene, and that his objection to “Merry Christmas” was, well, Scrooge-like. Today you can’t jump to that conclusion. In 21st-century America, some of our most enlightened arbiters of right and wrong are telling us pretty much the same thing as Uncle Scrooge. Naturally, being socially enlightened, they aren’t threatening Christmas greeters with pudding and holly. They prefer restraining orders and lawsuits.
Public schools have felt the heat. One district recalled 11,000 lunch menus after the nutrition services department went berserk and printed “Merry Christmas” on them. A high school canceled its performance of “A Christmas Carol” because it would have raised unseemly questions about “public school and religion.” Elsewhere, officials have excised red and green napkins and even instrumental versions of traditional carols.
At the opposite, non-secular extreme of the holiday spectrum, champions of the true spirit of Christmas are going to court, too. They’ve been suing about everything from manger scenes in New Jersey school plays to a Texas student’s right to hand out “religious viewpoint gifts” at his class holiday party. Among the gifts were candy canes with an attached message that explained how the peppermint was shaped like a J for Jesus and the red stripe stood for blood.
Of course, if you’re concerned about Christmas traditions, it’s worth noting that Jesus’s name actually began with the equivalent of our letter Y, which wouldn’t have hung nearly as well on the pagan fir trees that Prince Albert brought from Germany and first made part of England’s Christmas, and ours, when he married Queen Victoria a couple of millennia after the wise men traveled to Bethlehem, which almost undoubtedly didn’t happen in December.
For many of us, Christmas is part of the pageant of redemption. But Christians need to recognize that Christmas was never solely, or initially, a religious observance. In fact, the Puritans went so far as to outlaw it as un-Christian, in part because so many of the traditions we’re presently battling over, from Christmas trees and Yule logs to eggnog and red and green holly, and napkins, were borrowed from older celebrations that marked the depth of winter and offered hope against the cold.
Don’t misunderstand. As I write this, I’m listening to Handel’s Messiah, and its chords that resonate in me aren’t all secular. But my personal, private sentiments aren’t the point.
Nobody’s are. Because we’re not talking about private devotion and faith. We’re talking about public conduct.
Nobody should expect a Christian to leave the Christ out of Christmas. At the same time, Christians can’t expect others who don’t share their Christian faith to insert Jesus of Nazareth into their celebration of winter, charity, and good cheer.
Christmas supporters rightly point out that Christmas often and increasingly gets shut out of schools in the name of sensitivity and multiculturalism, while Islam’s Eid and Kwanzaa, which wasn’t even invented until 1966, are deemed perfectly acceptable for classroom holiday consumption.
Even if you endorse multiculturalism, being the majority culture shouldn’t be a disadvantage. On the other hand, the Virginia mother who decided to make a point by sending her first-grader to school with a “Happy Birthday, Jesus” cake didn’t help matters. All she did was encourage extremists at the other pole.
Tolerance doesn’t enforce religion. It also doesn’t exclude it. Ardent secularists are quick to quote Jefferson and his wall of separation between church and state. Except they conveniently forget that the unalienable rights he cited when he wrote the Declaration of Independence were, in his words, gifts from his Creator, that the legitimacy of the new nation he was writing about rested on the laws of God, and that he appealed to Divine Providence and pleaded his case before the Supreme Judge of the World. Surely Tom wouldn’t object to a chorus of “White Christmas” at school.
On the retail front, Lowe’s, turning diversity backflips, once rechristened its Christmas trees “holiday trees” until pro-Christmas consumers threatened a boycott.
Somehow, I don’t think that’s what Jesus or Jefferson had in mind.
Sensitivity is good. That’s why if I bumped into Benjamin Netanyahu, King Abdullah, or the Dalai Lama, I probably wouldn’t wish them a Merry Christmas. And if some neighbors and passersby prefer wishing me a Happy Holiday, I don’t mind at all.
What I do mind is living in a world where anyone presumes to tell me how I prefer to be greeted, where Christian nationalism is mistaken for the faith Jesus preached, where sensitivity has boiled over into hypersensitivity, where we’re more offended by the wrong pair of words than we’re honored and comforted by the generosity and good will they express.
So whether or not he’s in fashion today, I’ll accept Tiny Tim’s blessing. I won’t turn down a blessing from any sincere soul. Because what matters aren’t the words, but the heart that’s behind them.
In hope and with best wishes from Poor Elijah and me.
