An Ortho Thought
reader wrote to me last evening to say that she couldn’t read the WSJ article I
provided a link for yesterday. I will
reproduce the article below in full so you all can read it.
Regardless of how the NYC marketers are attempting to white-wash
the Christmas holiday, the light of Christ burns bright in many, many hearts in
the United States. We need to use this
to our advantage, to the glory of God.
Rev. Fr. Philemon Patitsas of St. Katherine Greek Orthodox
Church in Naples, FL, invites us to become involved in the Christian Rights and Freedom Institute. Please visit this link for more info http://stkatherine.net/christian-rights-and-freedom/ This is an
excellent resource for us at this time in our nation’s history and a good way
to represent the Christian viewpoint in a cohesive way. Thank you, Fr. Philemon, for making this effort known to us.
Here is the full WSJ article as mentioned
above: http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-year-christmas-died-1450914228
The Year Christmas Died
A ‘holiday’ window at Bergdorf Goodman in New
York City.
Photo: Mark Lennihan/Associated Press
By
Daniel
Henninger
As
we moved into December and what for some time has been called “the holiday
season,” the Office of Diversity and Inclusion at the University of Tennessee issued
a “best practices” directive for the campus to “ensure your holiday party is
not a Christmas party in disguise.”
A Christmas
party in disguise? Has it come to this?
Aghast state
legislators got the directive rescinded, but the Christmas killers will get the
last laugh. In fact, they’ve already won. This is the year Christmas died as a
public event in the United States.
We know this
after touring the historic heart of public Christmas—Fifth Avenue in New York
City.
For
generations, American families have come to New York in December to swaddle
themselves in the glow and spirit of Christmas—shops, restaurants, brownstones,
the evergreen trees along Park Avenue, bar mirrors and, most of all, Fifth
Avenue’s department-store windows. You couldn’t escape it, and why would you
want to?
A friend, an
ardent atheist, would be inconsolable if he couldn’t sing Handel’s entire
“Messiah” with 3,000 other revelers this month at Lincoln Center. Even if the
only god you worship is yourself, December in New York has always been about
the bustling good cheer flowing from the Christian holiday.
For many,
December required a pilgrimage to Saks Fifth Avenue, Lord & Taylor and
Bergdorf Goodman. No matter the weather, people walked the mile from 38th
Street to 59th Street and jammed sidewalks to see these stores’ joyful
Christmas windows.
Stay home.
This year Fifth Avenue in December is about . . . pretty much nothing, or
worse.
To be sure,
the magnificent Rockefeller Center Christmas tree still stands, and directly
across on Fifth Avenue is St. Patrick’s Cathedral, its facade washed and hung
with a big green wreath. But walk up or down the famous avenue this week and
what you and your children will see is not merely Christmas scrubbed, but what
one can only describe as the anti-Christmas.
Forget public
Nativity scenes, as court fiat commanded us to do years ago. On Fifth Avenue
this year you can’t even find dear old Santa Claus. Or his elves. Christmas
past has become Christmas gone.
The scenes
inside Saks Fifth Avenue’s many windows aren’t easy to describe. Saks calls it
“The Winter Palace.” I would call it Prelude to an Orgy done in vampire white
and amphetamine blue.
A luxuriating
woman lies on a table, her legs in the air. Saks’ executives, who bear
responsibility for this travesty, did have the good taste to confine to a side
street the display of a passed-out man on his back (at least he’s wearing a
tux), spilling his martini, beneath a moose head dripping with pearls. Adeste
Gomorrah.
But you
haven’t seen the anti-Christmas yet. It’s up at 59th Street in the “holiday”
windows of Bergdorf Goodman. In place of anything Christmas, Bergdorf offers
“The Frosty Taj Mahal,” a palm-reading fortune teller—and King Neptune, the
pagan Roman god, seated with his concubine. (One Saks window features the Roman
Colosseum, the historic site of Christian annihilation.)
I thought:
Lord & Taylor! Surely the iconic Christmas windows on 38th Street won’t
shelve St. Nick. They did. He’s gone, replaced by little bears and cupcakes,
gingerbread men and Canada geese.
There is one
holdout to the de-Santification of America: In Macy’s windows at Sixth Avenue and 34th
Street—as in “Miracle on 34th Street”—the characters of “A Charlie Brown
Christmas” frolic in Yuletide splendor.
The
Christmas-less feeling along once-famous Fifth Avenue this year is similar to
the loss one feels reading the last lines of “Casey at the Bat”—a shattering,
historic strikeout.
The erasure of
Christmas between the grinding stones of secular fanaticism will persist.
Eventually the holiday will be forbidden, forgotten and filed away in attic
boxes. But maybe God, in His usual mysterious way, is nudging us back toward
the beginning.
Once the
inevitable Federal Office of Diversity and Inclusion has joined with the
commercial cynics at Saks and Bergdorf’s to suppress even Santa, what pretext
will parents have to give gifts to their Christmas-cleansed children? Amazon
Day?
In the
post-Christmas era, the infant Jesus and Santa Claus will go back to the
catacombs of early Christian life, where you won’t have to say happy holidays
to anyone. Christmas as we know it will die off, and what will be left on
December 25th will look a lot like Thanksgiving, but smaller.
Unless
celebrating Christmas in America becomes a prosecutable crime, as it was in the
Soviet Union, families will go to church in the morning to renew the beginnings
of their faith and then spend the day at home listening to pirated copies of
the carols and hymns on Bing Crosby’s “White
Christmas” album. For radical refuseniks, I recommend playing, at the highest
possible volume, “The Bells of St. Mary’s” on Phil Spector’s
“A Christmas Gift for You.”
As for Saks
and the other Fifth-Avenue sellouts, I have two words this season. They aren’t
Merry Christmas.
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