{"id":60793,"date":"2013-12-25T07:00:19","date_gmt":"2013-12-25T12:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=60793"},"modified":"2013-12-25T18:46:07","modified_gmt":"2013-12-25T23:46:07","slug":"if-theres-a-war-were-losing-it-merry-christmas-vs-happy-holidays","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2013\/12\/25\/if-theres-a-war-were-losing-it-merry-christmas-vs-happy-holidays\/","title":{"rendered":"If There’s a War, We’re Losing It: “Merry Christmas” vs “Happy Holidays”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"1\"<\/a>I would guess that most of us were unaware of the war on Christmas raging all around us until Bill O\u2019Reilly started reporting from the front. He has since been joined by seasoned war reporters like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck. I get the sense that they don\u2019t really take themselves very seriously on this one \u2013 their war cries often sound like self-parody \u2013 and I guess that this attitude gives them license to say much that is silly and incorrect. Which they do.<\/p>\n

Still, these Christian warriors may be right about the general decline of Christian hegemony in American culture.\u00a0 What\u2019s curious is how that historical trend seems out of sync with the historical trend in the war on Christmas. In fact, it looks like there was a similar war on Christmas 60-70 years ago, a war that went unnoticed.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Reilly\u2019s war has two important battlegrounds \u2013 legal challenges to government-sponsored religious displays, and people saying \u201cHappy Holidays\u201d instead of \u201cMerry Christmas.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 He sets the start of the current war in the early years of this century.\u00a0From\u00a0Fox News Insider<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cEverything was swell up until about 10 years ago when creeping secularism and pressure from groups like the ACLU began attacking the Christmas holiday. They demanded the word Christmas be removed from advertising and public displays.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many people caved in to their demands, creating what O\u2019Reilly has dubbed as the \u201cHappy Holidays\u201d syndrome.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If pushed, O\u2019Reilly might trace the origins of the war back further than that \u2013 to the 1960s.\u00a0 That\u2019s when the secularists and liberals started fighting their long war, at least according to the view from the right.\u00a0 It was in the 1960s that liberals started winning victories and when the world as we knew it started falling apart. In the decades before that, we took it for granted that America was a White Christian nation.\u00a0 We all pulled together in World War II without questioning that dominance. And our national religion continued to hold sway in the peaceful and prosperous 1950s. We even added \u201cunder God\u201d to the Pledge of Allegiance.\u00a0 And of course, we all celebrated Christmas and said, \u201cMerry Christmas,\u201d no questions asked.<\/p>\n

But then came drugs, sex, rock \u2019n\u2019 roll, protests against an American war, and \u201cGod is Dead\u201d on the cover of Time<\/em>. Worse yet, in 1963 the Supreme Court ruled that the establishment clause of the First Amendment meant that public schools (i.e., government-run schools) could not impose explicitly sectarian rituals on children.\u00a0 No Bible reading, no Christmas pageants.<\/p>\n

The trouble is that even if this history is accurate, it doesn\u2019t have much to do with the War on Christmas, especially \u201cthe Happy Holidays syndrome.\u201d\u00a0 I checked these two phrases at Google Ngrams \u2013 a corpus of eight million books.<\/p>\n

The first big rise in \u201cHappy Holidays\u201d comes just after the end of World War II.<\/p>\n

\"1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

From about 1946 to 1954, it increases sixfold. It goes out of fashion as quickly as it came in, and even in the supposedly secular 1960s, it rarely turned up (at least in the books scanned by Google).\u00a0 The next rise does not begin until the late 1970s, continues through the Reagan and Clinton years.<\/p>\n

But just when O\u2019Reilly says the War started, \u201cHappy Holidays\u201d starts to\u00a0 decline.<\/p>\n

And what about \u201cMerry Christmas\u201d?\u00a0 According to the War reporters, the new secularism of the last ten years has been driving it underground.\u00a0 But Ngrams tells a different story.<\/p>\n

\"2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

If there was a time when \u201cHappy Holidays\u201d was replacing \u201cMerry Christmas,\u201d it was in the Greatest Generation era of the 1940s.\u00a0 Since the late 1970s, when \u201cHappy Holidays\u201d was rising, so was \u201cMerry Christmas.\u201d Apparently, there was just a lot more seasonal spirit to go around.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the best way to see the relative presence of the two phrases is to look at the ratio of \u201cMerry Christmas\u201d to \u201cHappy Holidays.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"3\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In 1937, there were 260 of the religious greeting for every one of the secular.\u00a0 In the 1940s the ratio plummeted; by the late 1950s it had fallen to about 40 to one.\u00a0 In the Sixties, \u201cMerry Christmas\u201d makes a slight comeback, then declines again.<\/p>\n

By the turn of the century, the forces of \u201cMerry Christmas\u201d are ahead by a ratio of \u201conly\u201d about 18 to one.\u00a0 Since then \u2013 i.e., during the period O\u2019Reilly identifies as war time \u2013 the ratio has increased slightly in favor of \u201cMerry Christmas.\u201d<\/p>\n

O\u2019Reilly may be right that at least in public greetings \u2013 by store clerks, by public officials, and by television networks (even O\u2019Reilly\u2019s Fox) \u2013 the secular \u201cHappy Holidays\u201d is displacing the sectarian \u201cMerry Christmas.\u201d\u00a0 But that still doesn\u2019t explain a similar shift over a half-century ago, another war on Christmas that nobody seemed to notice.<\/p>\n

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Jay Livingston is the chair of the Sociology Department at Montclair State University<\/a>. You can follow him at Montclair SocioBlog<\/a> or on Twitter<\/a>.<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I would guess that most of us were unaware of the war on Christmas raging all around us until Bill O\u2019Reilly started reporting from the front. He has since been joined by seasoned war reporters like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck. I get the sense that they don\u2019t really take themselves very seriously on this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":258,"featured_media":60796,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[15,23384,253,254,129,406,42],"class_list":["post-60793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-culture","tag-social-construction-discourselanguage","tag-history","tag-holidays","tag-media","tag-propaganda","tag-religion"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2013\/12\/35.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/258"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60793"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60793\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60802,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60793\/revisions\/60802"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}