Gerard Baker

Leave it a friend across the pond to so eloquently describe our conundrum at "Chrismastime." Courtesy of the Times + Arts & Letters.


Christmas captures the defining characteristic of Americans - their lack of cynicism and scepticism
AMERICANS ARE enjoying all the usual rituals of the Christmas season; the last-minute frenzy of present buying; the long wait in queues at airports and stations; and above all the inevitable controversy about the ever more absurd attempts to take Christ out of Christmas.
Every year some villain steps forward to take the Politically Correct Scrooge Award for sheer seasonal silliness. This year the traditionalists’ favourite target is, conveniently, a company called Target. A giant retailer in the continental hypermarket mould that sells everything from 86in television screens to bottles of tap water, Target has decreed that none of its products this year should carry the word “Christmas”. So instead of Christmas lights, Christmas trees and Christmas decorations, Target’s customers can spend their hard-earned dollars on holiday lights, seasonal trees and festive decorations.
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I am not sure if this ruling applies to model Nativity scenes. But I suspect that as long as they are relabelled Historic Middle Eastern Family Creative Toys they might just get in under the wire.
It is always fun to watch the contortions that people will go through to find new ways to avoid offending people. At a school not far from me, the children will be celebrating the last day of school in the usual way — with a midwinter peace assembly. This is the same school, by the way, that banned children from wearing martial costumes for its Hallowe’en parade. The headmaster began the day by confiscating these instruments of hate and before long had a pile of plastic guns, swords, light sabres and helmets blocking the light inside his office, and a huddle of crying children and bewildered parents outside.
I have heard some people refer to this time of year, perhaps half in jest, as “Chriskwanukkah”, an unlovely portmanteau of Christmas, Chanukkah and Kwanzaa, the African-American winter festival. But aside from being unpronounceable, this is self-evidently offensive to Druids and other observers of the pagan solstice and will presumably be dropped next year.
These attempts to be inoffensive and inclusive have started to become quite offensive and exclusionary.
I have lived in America long enough to know that I should never grasp the hand of colleagues or friends and wish them the joy and peace of the newborn king in case they turn out to be practising Zoroastrians. But it has got to the point where I worry now about upsetting fellow Christians if I proffer them a limp handshake and that flaccid salute to mushy multiculturalism: “Happy Holidays”.
And yet the truth is I rather like this annual Christmas controversy. For one thing it helps to debunk one of the more absurd myths about America that the rest of the world clings to — that it is firmly in the grip of some theocracy in which schoolchildren learn creationism by rote and White House officials slaughter the fatted calf before drawing up their foreign policy plans.
In fact, separation of Church and State is much more rigid here than is ever imagined in the wildest dreams of European anticlericals. My own children were able, if I may say so, to execute quite brilliantly their annual Christmas pageant at their Catholic school this week only because not one secular penny of taxpayers’ money supports it. My guess would be that your average Englishman or German is much freer to indulge in public displays of openly religious sentiment at this time of year than anyone in California or Florida.
But, above all, the annual fuss about taking Christ out of Christmas misses the central point about the holiday season in America. This time of year captures, perhaps better than any other, the defining characteristic of Americans in the modern world — their lack of cynicism and scepticism, their enduring hope and faith in themselves, their country and even the world around them.
In Britain and most of Europe, Christmas has become that special occasion for wallowing in cynicism. We love to complain about the shopping, the train delays and the weather. Popular culture disdains the spirit of the season, and plays up instead the secularist, sceptical, mocking, lost innocence tone of British life.
With a few ghastly exceptions from Sir Cliff, popular music in Britain at this time of year is blunt and unsentimental, even when charitable. But Americans indulge their sentimentality, pander to their idealism, reaffirm their belief in the spiritual contingency of human nature and their popular culture reflects that.
Nothing is too schmaltzy or saccharine. Even Hollywood for a brief moment casts aside its usual predilections and expresses a wide-eyed child-like thrill at the coming of Christmas. Radio stations become an endless loop of Christmas songs — not the typical “So Here it is Merry Christmas” British classic — but shameless repeats of Bing Crosby, Dean Martin and Harry Belafonte.
It’s a Wonderful Life, Frank Capra’s hymn to sentimentalism, will doubtless get a look in somewhere in the British TV schedules, but in America it will own its usual spot, slap in the middle of NBC’s prime time on Christmas night and I guarantee that there will not be a dry eye in the country when once again George Bailey hears the bell ringing for Clarence, the angel who gets his wings.
At other times, I can’t quite take all this American idealism and sentimentality. It is just a bit too much at odds with a complex world. As the country’s critics never tire of observing, it can lead to a little too much certainty and self-belief and a deficit of doubt and acknowledgement of error.
But, at this time of year, a bit of simple faith, a bit of uncynical joy and a bit of human hope induced by that unfathomable miracle that happened a couple of thousand years ago, is right on the mark.
gerard.baker@thetimes.co