Syncronicity struck yesterday. Shortly after I posted my little gripe about Chri$tma$, I ran across an editorial in the International Herald Tribune, titled "Commercialize Christmas, or else" by Adam Cohen. In the article, Cohen describes the history of Christmas. There's a one thing I found amusing: the original Puritans despised the Christmas holiday. Wrote Cohen, "They could not find Dec. 25 in the Bible and insisted that the date derived from Saturnalia, the Roman heathens' wintertime celebration." It was Emperor Constantine who set the date to join the Christian celebration with the pagan celebration. (This is the same reason most of the Religious Right boycott Halloween. Nothing wrong with a little hypocrisy.) That view held forth through much of the 1800s, that the celebration of Chri$tma$ distracted worshippers from religious piety.

It wasn't until the late 1800s, when "A Visit from St. Nicholas" was published with illustrations by Thomas Nast that we got the image of a jolly Santa.

In the 1920s, business adopted Chri$tma$ as their own holiday. That's when the phrase "Holiday Shopping Season" begins appearing. The popularity of Chri$tma$ exploded. By 1953, folks were complaining that the celebration of Christ's birth had become a time to seek profits. In 1965, "A Charlie Brown Christmas" aired, popularizing the sentiment. Linus even read from the Bible, something no other Chri$tma$ special had done before, to emphasize the point. Sadly, we ignored the lesson.

Today, most corporations generate half their revenues in November and December. Folks even have put up Paris Hilton Christmas displays! That's American!

So the "old fashioned American Christmas" that everyone is mourning is really about the generation of corporate revenues. If it was really about Christ, we wouldn't buy gifts, we wouldn't bake pies, we wouldn't travel and we wouldn't consume rum laced milk drinks. We would be in church.