Christmas Past, Christmas Present
December 10, 2010
ALAN writes:
In the 1950s, a life-size Nativity scene was displayed outside the Soldiers Memorial building in downtown St. Louis. The mayor sent out Christmas cards bearing a likeness of that scene and the words “Merry Christmas.” Lights in the tall Civil Courts building formed a cruciform pattern when viewed from a distance. Christmas trees were everywhere downtown and always called “Christmas trees,” not “holiday trees.” Americans had not yet been softened up and dumbed down enough to accept idiotic neologisms like “holiday tree,” as they do today.
Collier’s magazine, Dec. 1955: “Christmas in St. Louis has a tone all its own. The whole town resounds with carols.”
Today the whole city surrenders to political correctness.
St. Louis Public Library staff newsletter, Dec. 1966: “Christmas decorations put up in the library this week have brought a festive atmosphere to the building both inside and outside. Attracting the most attention is a 15-foot Christmas tree in the main hall….”
A photo shows an audience of men (in suits and ties) and women and girls (in dresses) seated around the Christmas tree to enjoy a concert of Christmas carols. Were newspapers filled the next day with stories of people who were “offended” by those things? They were not.
Dec. 1984: Newspaper photo shows library staff members standing outside and singing Christmas carols for passers-by. Was the library flooded the next day with complaints from people who were “offended” by that? It was not.
The inversion of American culture in the years since then is appalling. Americans now agree to surrender that tradition – of celebrating Christmas in public buildings and places – and to alter their vocabulary in order “not to offend”……who? Anyone, anywhere. Which means: Not to offend people whose goal has long been to bury America and Christianity. The witlessness and cowardice of modern Americans are astonishing to behold. Observe that being “offensive” applies to Christmas – but not to people who jabber in your face on their trendy cell phones in every public and semi-public place, or to those who inflict their “rock music” or “rap music” on everyone around them. Observe the civil order inverted: Beauty and restraint are offensive, but atrocious manners and ugly noise are never offensive.
Did MacArthur and Patton realize they were fighting World War II so that their descendants could apologize for American strength, pride, virtue, and cultural traditions? To apologize for the national and religious holiday of Christmas to any opportunist, parasite, or anti-American agitator who declares “I am offended”?
To apologize for one’s faults is one thing. To apologize for one’s virtues – like the joy, beauty, and splendor of Christmas trees and carols celebrated proudly in the public square – is quite another. When Americans permit their enemies to redefine their virtues as faults, they might as well surrender outright. Their supine surrender of Christmas in the public square proves beyond doubt that modern Americans are among the most gullible people in history. They now do to themselves what Americans in 1941 had enough sense not to permit German and Japanese thugs to do to them: Black out Christmas.
Two weeks after Pearl Harbor was bombed, men in St. Louis wrote that Americans were fighting for all the Christmases and other values that made America what it was, and that there would be no cancellation of Christmas in the public square prompted by their professional enemies in Germany and Japan (“No Blackout of Christmas”, St. Louis Commerce magazine, Dec. 24, 1941).
Today those “professional enemies” are not German or Japanese thugs but Marxist agitators, propagandists for “diversity” and “multiculturalism”, and Fabian Socialist change agents, among others.
A hundred years ago this month, Socialists wrote: “Christmas is a fraud and a crime.” In Stalinist Russia, it was a crime to sell or buy Christmas trees. In Communist-dominated Eastern Europe in the 1940s-‘50s, public observances of Christmas and traditional Christmas carols were outlawed. Christmas trees were renamed “New Year Trees.”
(See, for instance, Joseph J. Mereto, The Red Conspiracy [National Historical Society, 1920], Alfred Martin Rehwinkel, Communism and the Church [Concordia Publishing House, 1948], and Gary MacEoin, The Communist War on Religion [Devin-Adair, 151].)
But there is no need for a tyrannical government here, if naïve Americans can be taught to do those things to themselves, as they now agree to do, like so many trained seals.
St. Anthony of Padua Catholic church in St. Louis opened in 1910. When I was an altar boy there at Christmas Midnight Mass fifty years ago, the church was filled to capacity. Today – when it is thoroughly modernist and promotes “openness” – the entire parish would not fill the church. If my grandparents could witness these things, they would conclude that both American culture and the Catholic Church have been surrendered by fools and cowards. And they would be right.
— Comments —
A reader writes:
Christmas Village is located in Torrington, CT. Some atheists have been pushing to rename it Holiday Village, but the residents of Torrington have pushed back, and insist on keeping the name “Christmas Village”, as it has been for 62 years. It is nice to see a town fighting to keep the Christmas in Christmas Village. I am sending you a picture of Christmas Village, which is always a magical place for children.
Please don’t use my name if you choose to print this as I don’t want to be identified and I live close to Christmas Village.
