This past December 21st, I (along with all other students in WashU’s College of Arts & Sciences) received an email from the office of the dean wishing me a Happy New Years. While I appreciate the message, it seemed to contain a glaring omission. After all, wasn’t there a holiday with much greater significance than New Years that was a lot closer to December 21st? While much of the discussion on the “War on Christmas,” can be very over-the-top, and much of the modern celebration of Christmas forgets the reason for the season (as well as the penitential spirit of advent), there is still an attempt by the secular culture to ignore Christmas or turn it merely into a commercial holiday.
While oftentimes “Happy Holidays” is used instead of “Merry Christmas,” ArtSci decided to take it a step further and not mention anything but New Year. “Happy Holidays” at least recognizes that there are holidays (indeed Christmastide is full of feasts until Epiphany), though it is a very vacuous phrase in its contemporary usage. However, by merely saying “Happy New Years,” ArtSci is simply “memory-holing” Christmas, pretending that it, and Christianity do not exist. So much for pluralism, I guess, as the “neutral public square” seeks to erase the religions1 that created our civilization.
While this may seem like making a mountain out of a molehill, it is indeed significant. Christmas is one of the most important holidays not only for Christians but for Western Civilization as a whole. This is why it oftentimes comes under fire from various tyrants who seek to create year-zero, be it Oliver Cromwell banning Christmas in England, the Jacobins banning it in France, or the Bolsheviks not only banning it, but trying to replace it with New Year. Thus, Christmas is important is it grounds us in reality, both in time as it establishes us temporally to the birth of Christ, and also in telos as it shows us our place in relation to God. It is for this reason that totalitarian regimes attack Christmas, as Christmas is the holiday that reminds us of who we are, as fallen men who need grace, and as people inhabiting a real and physical time and space (and thus not gnostics or merely vessels for ideas). To erase Christmas is, therefore, to erase both physical and metaphysical reality, and to replace a logocentric view of time and space with an egocentric one fixated on the present.
But fear not, dear reader, for here at the Danforth Dispatch, we will continue to wish you a Merry Christmas. And while we are at it, I highly recommend Sir John Betjeman’s poem Christmas, as well as “Veni Veni Emanuel,” a 12th Century Christmas hymn, as the former touches very powerfully both on the modern Christmas spirit and why we celebrate it, and the latter captures the yearning of the world to be ransomed from sin before the coming of Christ. Furthermore, in reference to the recent article by my friend Wil Welch about a performance of Handel’s Messiah, I will strongly recommend the rendition of “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” set to a tune of Handel’s. Feel free to listen to any of them (or not), but regardless, we wish you a Merry Christmas and (to all ArtSci students) a Happy New Year!
- Christianity in this case, but also Judaism as shown by the antisemitism of the modern secular culture that has been on full display since October 7th. ↩︎