Retail vs Religion
Behind the battle lines
By Steve Croyle |
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The War on Christmas. The battle has been waged for years. Even though Angry White Pundits have found bigger and better things to rail against (Obama), the lines are still drawn. There are still Politically Correct retailers out there who dare to take Christ out of Christmas. They must be stopped.
I asked Joe Valenti, owner of the Short North's vintage mecca, Flower Child, where he stands. "I said 'Merry Christmas' the other day and a customer nearly took my head off," he said.
Joe's a Christmas kind of guy. It's how he was raised and his natural inclination is to wish people a Merry Christmas, but he feels the pressure to extend neutral greetings in his shop... not from liberal activists hell-bent on a PC agenda, but from regular customers.
"You just don't know what holidays people celebrate," Joe lamented. "I don't want to have to read everybody, so I just wish them a happy holiday."
Calls to the public relations departments of several retail corporations, with questions on their strategy to kill Christmas, turned up no official comments. After bouncing through Target's corporate switchboard in Minneapolis, a man named Dean picked up the phone in what was supposed to be the media relations department.
"We don't want to get into that," he said as he hung up the phone.
The Linworth United Methodist Church held a Holiday Gift Sale in early November. Did they cave to PC pressure?
"Oh no," said Andrea, who nervously provided only her first name. "We have a lot of Christmas items, but the sale is so early in the season and we have so many other gifts, we didn't want people to think it was only for Christmas items."
Target is often attacked by various groups because they famously made the call to forbid the Salvation Army from deploying bell ringers at their stores. Target simply enforced its long-standing solicitation policy, but a fact often omitted from the apocryphal tales is that Target's corporate office donates large sums of money to the Salvation Army.
Also omitted is the fact that the ubiquitous bell ringers are routinely turned away by other retailers, large and small.
"A lot of places say 'no,'" a local volunteer coordinator explained. Some places also restrict the Salvation Army's times and a few insist that only volunteers ring the bells at their sites. Sometimes the decision comes from a corporate office; often, it's up to the discretion of the local manager.
One such manager, who insists on remaining nameless so as to maintain a non-combatant status, said that he respects the Salvation Army but has simply had too many bad experiences with the bell ringers in the past.
"I don't want to get into it, but it wasn't the Salvation Army so much as it was the temporary workers sent out to ring the bells," he said.
He also supports the use of the all-inclusive happy holidays greeting. Like Joe from Flower Child, the pressure isn't from activist groups or stuffed suits in a corporate office, but rather from individual customers.
"Sometimes people are looking for a reason to go off," he said. "They think if they get offended enough they'll get a discount. It's a lot easier to say 'happy holidays' and let people interpret their own meaning."
The American Family Association doesn't see it that way and they have posted a 'Naughty and Nice' list to identify companies on the wrong side of the battle line. Their website, www.afa.net, outlines the criteria used and features a color-coded system to help combatants identify the stores to keep an eye on.
I asked AFA Spokesman Randy Sharp why Gap, Inc. was the only company on the 'naughty' list to be the subject of a seasonal boycott.
"I don't know if you know this," he said, "but they're based in San Francisco. That's a liberal city where everybody's so inclusive. They have 'different lifestyles' and all of that politically correct stuff."
Gap, Inc. counters that their advertising does include Christmas, although the company does strive to be an inclusive brand that respects the individual beliefs of their customers. Is inclusion really the same as secularization?
Randy paused for a few seconds. "I don't want to get misquoted," he said. "The fact is that the polls indicate that people don't like companies taking Christ out of Christmas. They [Gap, Inc.] are weakening an American tradition."
But Gap asserts that they are giving a nod to Christmas, recent advertising uses the term, and Gap has never imposed a moratorium on Christmas.
"It was a shallow attempt," Randy said. "The ad had Christmas lumped in with Kwanza, Chanukah, and Solstice. It was a cavalier approach. You don't give gifts on Solstice. That's a pagan holiday."
Not exactly. Pagans traditionally have celebrations around the Solstice, along with countless other religions, in an event often called Yule (sound familiar?), but those are mere semantics. No time for 'words.' There's a war to be fought.
Randy also expressed disdain that a lot of retailers will decorate their stores for Christmas, but not use the word Christmas. "Wreaths, trees, lights, holly, bows . . . these are all Christmas traditions," he said.
Actually, they're not. In fact, most of those holiday trimmings are derived from solstice-oriented celebrations. Additionally, theological scholars agree that Jesus was born much earlier in the year and that the very date of Christmas was chosen to coincide with pre-Christian traditions.
"But they're part of the tradition of Christmas in this country," he countered.
Of course, once you've commandeered one culture's methodology, it's yours to keep forever and ever, but what about Christians who object to retailers using Jesus to sell gifts? There is a valid argument that the true meaning of Christmas is not about the almighty dollar. What about the stores that are sensitive to that argument?
"Look," Randy said, "these companies are out for money. They want us to spend our money Christmas shopping. They're selling Christmas, so they should use the term."
But isn't that trite? Aren't all of the companies on the AFA's 'nice' list guilty of doing exactly what Gap did: just slapping the term Christmas on their advertising campaigns to placate a small group of people? It all seems so superficial.
Randy seemed to agree, "If you're going to patronize us go ahead and patronize us, but don't offend us."
Speaking of patronage, if you'd like to order a button to support the AFA and do your part to spread their brand of Christmas cheer you can visit their online store. Apparently keeping Christ in Christmas doesn't mean you have to keep the Cha-ching out of it.
*http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Patronize
Originally Published: December 1, 2009
