The "war on Christmas" is hardly a new meme, although it did take a break.
I did a little looking. :evilgrin:
We know it was revived in earnest last year; but there was a long, long gap between 1990 and 2004 when Christmas apparently wasn't threatened.
I couldn't find the phrase "war on Christmas" anywhere in U.S. newspapers in that time. Interestingly, as near as I can tell, the Washington Times was the first to trot it out in 2004.
Many can access 2004 news; here's something from 1990 as grist for the mill.
Letter to the Editor, the Capital Times of Madison, WI, December 20, 1990:Dear Editor:
How sad that your Dec. 6 editorial should support the Madison schools' war on Christmas.
Thanks to the district's anti-Christmas policy, school secretaries are afraid to keep a poinsettia on their desks. Parents are supposed to be able to walk out of a Christmas concert not thinking that they've just been to a Christmas concert. How Kafka-esque!
(snip)
What kind of Orwellian doublespeak is a policy that disapproves of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer because he pulls Santa's sleigh and because Santa Claus, as we know, is a contraction of St. Nicholas?
(snip)
The Capital Times introduces a red herring into the issue by suggesting that those who disapprove of Dr. Travis' policy are right-wing Christian fundamentalists "trying to see how much Christmas they can sneak into the schools.''
Peg Miller, Madison---
Peg Miller was not simply a parent, incidentally, although she garnered 443 signatures in an attempt to force the school to do a little Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Miller is currently Director of Religion Education at
St. Peters Catholic Church.
At the time, she was a representative of
Concerned Women for America, who are busily blowing the warning horn for attacks on Christmas these days. They first appeared on the national stage in 1981, where the Boston Globe reported in February of that year reported the CWFA had joined a list of supposedly 200 conservative groups who were going to start watching TV for vulgarity and organizing boycotts:
"THEY'LL BE WATCHING", Boston Globe February 3, 1981
A new coalition of predominantly conservative organizations said yesterday it will launch a monitoring and advertising boycott campaign to reduce "violence, vulgarity, sex and profanity" on television.
"We do not all share the same political orientation or religious convictions," said Donald E. Wildmon, chairman of the new Coalition for Better Television who also is head of the National Federation for Decency. "We do, however, share a mutual concern about television.
He said, "Concern about this issue is so strong that the coalition already represents the largest number of national and regional groups ever to join together in such a venture."
Wildmon declined to release a list of the approximately 200 groups he said had already joined the coalition. But present at his news conference were several people identified as members of the coalition's Board of Directors, including Ronald Godwin of the Moral Majority; Equal Rights Amendment opponent Phyllis Schlafly; Judie Brown, president of the American Life Lobby; and Beverly Lahaye of the Concerned Women for America.---
They didn't pick up Christmas for nearly a decade, but you can recognize the patterns. :)
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