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Was there ever actually a war on Christmas?

If there were really a War on Christmas then George W. Bush would have put on a Santa suit, landed a sleigh on an aircraft carrier and declared victory years ago.
 
Marcus said:
I'm an atheist, and anything but fond of the religious right, but it still irritates me when the giant public trees which are covered with Christmas decorations every December (here they're in the malls, with one in the park) are renamed Holiday Trees.

I don't believe in Jeebus either, bit I'm not required to be offended by the word "christmas", come on.
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This. That's pretty much it. You aren't putting up the tree because Judaism or Islam are doing it.
 
There have been lots of wars during Christmas, and on Christmas Day. ;)

I'm sure some nuts have fought against Christmas at various times, just like you can find nuts fighting against anything at any time.

Anecdote: As a teen I had a penpal in Alabama. I told her I was an atheist and she said "but what do you do at Christmas time?" Pretty much the same stuff you do..
 
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Yes there has been a war on Christmas, waged by Christians here in Scotland. Christmas became a public holiday here only in 1958. During the 17th and 18th centuries people were punished for celebrating this idolatrous pagan abomination as the Calvinists here believed it to be. See http://www.rampantscotland.com/know/blknow11.htm
After the Church Reformation in the 16th century, the celebration of Christmas was frowned on by the Kirk, which regarded it as a "Popish festival". Mass was banned in Scotland at that time and "Christmas" or "Christ's Mass" was included in that. There are records of charges being brought against people for keeping "Yule" as it was called in Scotland. Amazingly, this dour, joy-crushing attitude lasted for 400 years. Until the 1960s, Christmas Day was a normal working day for most people in Scotland. So if there is a specifically "Scottish" aspect to Christmas, it is that it was not celebrated.
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New Year's Eve, or "Hogmanay", was celebrated instead. Still is, in fact.
 
I don't mind calling a big public tree a "Christmas" tree so much, but nor would it occur to me to be irritated by someone choosing inclusive language instead. It's a perfectly reasonable intent and I don't see why to get mad at that if the whole point was not to be so sensitive in the first place. I would just take it as that they're avoiding conflict with people less reasonable than I am, or happened to not be interested in highlighting the "Christmas" aspect.
 
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ponderingturtle said:
Your chronology is backward. It was easier to convert people to christianity if they didn't have to give up their favorite parties. So the early christians appropriated them. So nothing pagan creeped in it was to expunge the true holiday.
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Not only that, but the "pagan" knowledge was actually useful: the winter solar solstice. Celebrating the sun beginning its return is obfuscated by superstitious nonsense now. Likewise with the summer solstice and both equinoxes - these are much more sensible things to mark your calendar by, since that's the fricking basis for calendars to begin with.

Just look at them, still trying to inject themselves into real scientific knowledge. Keep the people dumbed-down, fixated on a myth instead of paying attention to the actual mechanics of the universe.
 
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