Brief History: The War on Christmas
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| Fri, 12-18-2009 - 7:18pm |
I've lost count of the emails I've received about "the war on Xmas". Could have fooled me.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1946928,00.html
Attention, culture warriors: 'Tis the season to be vigilant. An atheist group has plastered Santa-themed antireligion ads on Los Angeles buses. Retailers insist on greeting shoppers with a neutral "Happy holidays," despite threats of boycotts. And the annual ABC broadcast of A Charlie Brown Christmas was pre-empted by President Obama's address on Afghanistan. The war on Christmas is back. (See the top 10 YouTube holiday specials.)
For decades, American conservatives have been warning of threats posed to the institution by a broad spectrum of foes. Henry Ford blamed Jews for the efforts to remove religious displays from public schools; in the McCarthy era, the John Birch Society saw the holiday as the target of a vast communist conspiracy. Since the 1990s, a right-wing website has held an annual competition for the most egregious example of secularization. (Villains include the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which christened its year-end party "A Celebration of Holiday Traditions.") But it was really during this decade that the Yule Wars caught fire. Fox News host John Gibson's book The War on Christmas hit best-seller lists in 2005, the same year his colleague Bill O'Reilly called moves to tone down the holidays the first steps on a slippery slope toward "legalization of narcotics, euthanasia, abortion at will, gay marriage." In 2006 Chicago Tribune poll, 68% of respondents agreed that the holiday was under assault. (See the 10 worst Christmas movies.)
But skeptics say rumors of a struggle against Santa are an overheated response to the excesses of political correctness, fanned by what commentator Max Blumenthal called a "ratings bonanza for right-wing media." The last to wage war on Christmas were probably the Puritans, who in the 17th century banned Yuletide festivities on the grounds that they didn't square with Scripture. For a godless conspiracy, those are some pious roots.




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~In my church many of the vestments have the joined XP on them.~
It's very common in denominations here, also :)
Kate
You are very welcome :) I was happy to clear that up.
Kate
Actually, you might want to read up on that Xmas stuff - so many Christians erroneously assume things are so because they have been 'told so' without doing their own research. In this case the term Xmas is quite old and was considered a term of respect - My goodness just exactly wwjthink?
"But it turns out that "Xmas" isn't a modern convention at all. It was used commonly in 16th-century Europe, when many people began using the term "Christos," the Greek translation for Christ, to refer to Jesus. The letter chi in the Greek alphabet is symbolized by an X and translates to "ch." So along with the Greek letter rho for "r", the term Xmas was used to refer to the birth of Jesus as an informed abbreviation, not an offensive one. Xmas was a way for Christian scholars to refer to Jesus respectfully in an ancient language -- not to disrespect his name with a harsh symbol. In fact, variations of "Xmas" date back to 1021 . "
http://christmas.howstuffworks.com/traditions/xmas.htm
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