In early life, my favorites Holidays were Independence Day and Christmas, with Halloween running just behind. Thanksgiving was an “also ran”, as were other American holidays. Since those days, I have seen Halloween become more popular, while Christmas and 4th of July have lost some of their luster.

On the 4th of July, l want to talk about why this has happened. Halloween has increased in the popularity mainly because it has not been under attack. Conversely, I feel like ndependence Day and Christmas have been under attack my entire life.

Christmas is Too Commercial

When I was a kid, intellectuals attacked Christmas, saying that people were spending too much on Christmas presents, obscuring the true meaning of Christmas (Jesus gave his life to save everyone’s souls). Instead of buying presents for their families and bosses, people should give to the poor, go to church, and pray.

Even a kid could see that these attacks missed the point of Christmas, which was celebrating the birth of Jesus, rather than his death. To give to the poor, feel guilty, fast, and pray at Easter is fine, but at Christmas you should be happy and celebrate.

Spending too much on presents for people we don’t like might be stupid, but I didn’t see why it would be bad or sinful. To me, 1950s and 60s liberals who tried to diminish Christmas as “too commercial” were just a version of the Grinch dressed in academic clothing.

I think the Grinch is widely understood as a character who resents the joy of others and seeks to take it away.

Most people want to be happy and successful. There are a few people out there (Grinches) who acrually do not want to be happy and successful. They prefer to attack people who are happy and successful and bring them down. The more successful and happy people are, the more the Grinches want to bring them down. Why else would you complain about other people spending too much of their own money on Christmas presents?

Since the initial efforts to downgrade Christmas were iignored by most people, subsequent attacks on Christmas had to go deeper.

Jesus Didn’t Exist or Didn’t Perform All The Miracles

In the 1970s and 80s, liberal atheists arrived with more sophisticated arguments against Christmas. To reduce people’s enjoyment of Christmas, they realized they would need to attack Christianity and Jesus himself. Their new argument proceeded as follows: “Maybe Jesus never existed. If he really existed, he never did all the things described in the bible, especially the miracles of healing the blind, or bringing back the dead.” Soon followed their haymaker: “Maybe he existed, but if he didn’t do everything the bible says, isn’t the whole thing a fraud.”

This last argument seemed powerful to me until one day (while I was a graduate student) my Uncle Alex told me: “Don’t judge people by the worst things they do or failed to do. Instead, judge people by the best things they ever did.”

The Sermon on the Mount vs Made-Up Stories

My uncle started talking about the The Sermon on the Mount, and its inclusion in the world’s most popular book (the Bible). “Historians agree that Jesus (or someone like him) probably did deliver The Sermon on the Mount (or something like it), in antiquity at a time when the Sermon proposed a radically new approach to human conduct. Imagine yourself in the Roman Empire around 30 A.D. attending The Sermon on the Mount. If you just take that Sermon, and throw the rest of the Book away, you can still make an argument for celebrating the guy’s birthday as a worldwide holiday.”

Somehow religious belief, especially in Christmas, makes most people feel happier and more successful (and they behave better) than they do during the rest of the year. Because of its message that money and power are not everything, most people “count their blessings” and feel more happy and successful at Christmas than at other times of year.

I have learned that a lot of American Jews, non-Christians, and atheists say they like Christmas because it makes them feel happy and safe. I think that is because Christmas is loaded with messages about tolerance and acceptance. I also learned that the messages in the Sermon on the Mount were linked by the American founders with the Declaration, and the Constitution as statements that all people shoud be equal before God.

Of course, if you are a Grinch, you don’t like a lot of people feeling happy and successful even one month of the year, so you would want to take that away by attacks on Christmas.

Christmas is a good thing for Christians, non-Christians, and even non-believers. It means no harm, and causes no harm to non-Christians or non-believers. The only possible reason for attacking it is that you don’t like people to feel happy and successful even one month of the year.

Now, at last, we’re getting back to my message about Independence Day.

Being an American is Like Christmas in July

Despite the allure of Christmas, my favorite holiday of all is Independence Day, the 4th of July, because what it represents makes me feel happy and successful during every month of the year. Beyond feelings, I believe what the 4th of July represents actually has made me more successful and more happy during my entire life.

Of course, the Grinches have been out there my whole life, when they are not attaccking Christmas, they start in on the 4th of July, American culture, and the American way of life.

Early criticisms of the 4th of July were about the dangers of letting everyone set off fireworks in their back yards. With fireworks banned in a lot of states, safer and more spectacular public fireworks displays monitored by fire departments appeared.

This was not what the Grnches wanted. They wanted to put a damper on our enthusiasm about the American experience and culture, our way of life. As with Christmas, the next wave of attacks had to be leveled at their real target, The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Attacks on our Founding Documents & the American Culture

These documents, that describe the first efforts of any country to recognize the equal rights of all people before God and to explain the benefits of personal liberty, property, and pursuit of happiness, are continually criticized by Grinches.

These documents (and the country that issued them) are hypocritical frauds, they say, because everyone did not receive immediate equality the moment the Constitution was issued. Southern Americans had slaves!

Never mind that, at the time, every country on the planet had slaves, daily traded slaves, issuing documents saying slavery was great and should continue. Never mind that the USA soon shed more blood than any nation to eliminate slavery. Never mind that England soon banned slavery from the British Empire while every non-white majority country would continued to practice slavery for the next 100 years.

The Grinch argument that America’s founding documents (the first of their kind, and still superior to those of any other country) are inherently evil, because they were not perfect, is patently ridiculous. Yet, this weak argument gained momentum when it was recently championed by the NY Times.

While the NY Times is very powerful, its missteps (outlined in The Gray Lady Winked) have caused many to quit reading it, or to read it with increasing skepticism.

Moving along from weak arguments against America, the Grinches have kept coming up with additional attacks on the American way of life.

Since Founding, equality of opportunity (giving everyone a shot) was and is bedrock American stuff. For its first 175 years, America was criticized for its obsession with equality by Europeans who believed in upper classes and lower classes. Subsequently, some Euros went Marxist, and American academics followed.

Marxists and neo-Marxists now say: “American culture creates inequality.” The Grinch (now played by Bernie Sanders) thinks Cuba and Russia are better than the USA, because socialism makes people “more equal”. “The heck with equal opportunity, we must have equal outcomes.”

Equality of outcome comes at a price. Since not everyone succeeds at the same rate under capitalism, a socialist solution is to push successful people down until everyone is equal. Cuba has approached this ideal by pushing the most successful Cubans below the American poverty level. Equality of outcome sounds nice to some, but has becomes ugly in practice wherever and whenever it has been tried.

Favorite American Holidays After 80 Years of Attacks

I used to think that attacks on American were a good way of keeping us honest and incentivizing Americans to improve things. 80 years of left wing attacks have caused me to realize that the Grinches are not working to improve America or Christmas. They want to tear them down, and make everyone one as unhappy as they are.

So, I have upgraded American Independence Day to my favorite American holiday, with Christmas running a close second. With the recent, Grinch-like attacks on Thanksgiving (which I won’t go into here), I have moved Thanksgiving to 3rd place ahead of Halloween. I like Halloween, but it’s doing OK without my support.

Finally, I used to have Columbus Day down at 11th or 12th, but based on the recent, ridiculous attacks on Columbus, I moved it up to 6th in my heart.

Thanks for listening!

Categories: Commentary

Tags: bible, charles-dickens, christmas, holidays, jesus