By Stephen L. Carter / Bloomberg Opinion
’Tis the holiday season, meaning joy and happiness and disagreement and litigation. In other words, it’s time for this year’s dispatches from the Christmas wars.
Let’s begin in Lamont, Calif., where the Chamber of Commerce, organizer of the annual Christmas parade, originally announced that this year’s event would be canceled due to expenses involved in defending against a defamation lawsuit apparently stemming from events during last year’s parade. (I can’t quite work out the details from the news reports.) Happily, the local Lion’s Club has taken over organizing duties, and the parade is scheduled to proceed as usual, but with an intriguing caveat: “There will be zero tolerance in terms of people intentionally creating conflict.” I’m not sure what’s going on in Lamont, but I do wish the town a Merry Christmas.
As usual, our holiday cornucopia overfloweth with litigation.
Let’s start by updating a pair of lawsuits that I’ve discussed in my Christmas wars columns. First, Mariah Carey looks likely to prevail against two songwriters who claim that the singer’s holiday standard “All I Want for Christmas Is You” — which seems to be everywhere this time of year — infringes the copyright of their own earlier work.
Another long-running item concerns the lawsuit by the Morris family of Hayden, Idaho, against the local homeowners’ association that forced them to shut down their, um, massive display of holiday lights. The Morrises argued that the association discriminated against them based on their Christian beliefs; the defendants insisted that they acted because the plaintiffs’ display (200,000 lights, dozens of volunteers, lots of traffic) was just too big. A jury awarded the Morrises $75,000 in damages, but the trial judge threw out the verdict. Earlier this year, a federal appellate court sent the case back for a new trial on some of their claims. So we’ll have to wait and see how things turn out.
In other Hayden, Idaho, holiday news, a resident has broken the world record for the heaviest cotton candy snowman.
Also still in litigation is the lawsuit by a local chapter of the Knights of Columbus against the town of Fairfield, Conn., for refusing the group permission to move its annual Christmas Vigil, which includes the display of a Nativity scene, to a more prominent public park than the one traditionally used. This action, says the Knights, violates their freedom of religion. If the plaintiffs’ allegations turn out to be true, they might have a case. At least one town official is said to have attributed the denial of a permit to sentiment in the community. A federal judge refused to dismiss the complaint. One assumes that Fairfield will settle.
More good news for First Amendment rights. A federal judge recently ordered the city of Prattville, Ala., to allow Prattville Pride, “a non-profit, LGBTQ organization,” to march in what the town still terms its Christmas parade. Prattville argued that Pride’s participation might pose a threat to public safety, implying not that the group would be violent but that its opponents might be. And Pride has indeed received online threats. But the judge correctly rejected the city’s effort to use this “heckler’s veto” against the victims. And the holiday season in Prattville just got a little more diverse.
But enough about lawyers and courts. No Christmas wars column would be complete without an account of the annual holiday battle for streaming eyeballs. According to The New York Times, this year’s slate of Christmas-themed movies includes some that have “ditched the sweaters and fleeting embraces for steamier visuals”; at least on Netflix and Lifetime. Remember all those pecks on the lips in the Hallmark fare? That’s so 2019. Writes the Times: “The kisses are passionate. And, in at least one instance, the lead characters have s-e-x” — the hyphens are the Times’ — although apparently, Lifetime crossed that particular line last season. (Still think the word “Christmas” isn’t mostly secular?)
Hallmark, the Christmas movie champion, is fighting back by moving in a different direction, garnering lots of glowing press with its “Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story.” Chiefs, as in Kansas City Chiefs, the football team. No kidding. Not only does the film feature a handful of the actual Kansas City players, but Travis Kelce’s mother has a cameo.
Finally, although I hate writing about politics, let me say a quick word about politics.
President-elect Donald Trump has promised to bring “Merry Christmas” back. But did the traditional greeting of the season ever leave? According to Christianity Today, of the 1.6 billion greeting cards sent out this time of year, some 53 percent say “Merry Christmas,” followed by “Happy Holidays.” (For those keeping score, “Season’s Greetings” is not third but fourth … right behind “other.”) A glance at Google’s Ngram Viewer shows that “Merry Christmas” has always dominated and still does.
Moreover, back when Trump was in the Oval Office, the Guardian pointed out that the once-and-future president’s own businesses used “Happy Holidays,” even though he had by then already insisted that “Merry Christmas” was back. Writing in The Atlantic recently, Elizabeth Bruenig reminds us of this bit of history in a piece arguing that “even devoutly conservative Christians” should consider greeting non-co-religionists with “Happy Holidays.” The point, after all, is to spread cheer, not spark fights.
Well, maybe. However, as The Atlantic itself noted a few years ago, the greeting “Happy Holidays” is also firmly established in Christian tradition. Some would go so far as to say it has Christian roots. A bit of research on your favorite website for old newspapers or books will uncover citations aplenty. For example, Julia Matilda Waley Cohen, a British author of inspirational works for children, wrote in a 1922 volume, “I hope you all have Happy Holidays,” only to follow the phrase at once with an explanation: “Do you ever think what the word holidays means? It means Holy Days.”
As for Christmas, let’s not forget that in the United States, Protestant churches fought long and hard against treating the day as holy. What broke the opposition was not the enthusiasm of the Catholic immigrants to whom the anti-Christmas sentiment was aimed. As the historian Stephen Nissenbaum explains, what overwhelmed the resistance was the utility of Christmas for commerce. In the 19th century, retailers saw the profit potential in persuading the rising middle class to buy gifts for loved ones, especially children. Victory for big business came in 1870 when President Grant declared December 25 a holiday for most of the federal workforce.
Which is to say that our national celebration of Christmas stems mainly from the secular holiday’s conquest of the religious one. As for Trump’s evident belief that retailers, for example, are nowadays afraid to say “Happy Holidays,” here, too, history has lessons. Pick any era when the nation was more bound to tradition, and you’ll find the greeting ubiquitous back then, too. Pharmacy advertisements in the Reagan years, Parents magazine stories in the good old 1950s, announcements from Wanamaker’s department store a hundred and more Christmases ago.
And, by the way, if a long, hard political year has worn you out, browsing an outdoor display of real Christmas trees might make you feel better. Or so claims a recent paper. A small sample size, yes, and it describes a laboratory experiment only; but wouldn’t it be lovely if it were to turn out to be true?
This is what I wish for all my readers: a lovely holiday season when dreams come true.
Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a professor of law at Yale University and author of “Invisible: The Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster.”
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