’Tis the season

’Tis the season

This has been a particularly contentious Christmas season, both nationally and locally.

Nationally, the front-loaded presidential primary season created a new phenomenon, the political Christmas commercial. It was inflicted in prime time only on the residents of early primary states, but the rest of us couldn’t avoid snippets on TV news shows. Our Christmas wish is that by 2012 the parties manage to rewrite their primary calendars so that the closest holiday to the first voting is St. Patrick’s Day.

Here at home, billboards ignited anew the debate over whether “merry Christmas” or “happy holidays” was the appropriate greeting. The debate, played out in letters to the editor, on radio talk shows and at some Christmas (holiday?) parties provided more heat than light. It became crystal clear that when it comes to our season of excess, opinions about what Jesus would think or say or do are without number, as the sands of the sea.

An old story

Christmas debates are nothing new. Scripps Howard News Service points out that some Americans have been going overboard for Christmas virtually since the first European settlers set foot in North America. The Puritans tried to rein it in. So did New York, Philadelphia and other big cities in the 18th and early 19th centuries when gunpowder and alcohol made the observance a little too raucous for the city fathers.

Some religious denominations were skeptical that Christmas should be celebrated at all. They saw no scriptural justification for it, but slowly gave in to the appeal of the day, and the Gospel of Luke became the working script for generations of Nativity plays. And today there are actual businesses that specialize in supplying camels, donkeys and sheep for the pageants.

Today’s American Christmas owes much to Clement Moore and “’Twas the Night Before Christmas,” to Charles Dickens and “A Christmas Carol” and to a newspaper cartoonist, Thomas Nast, whose visual representation of Santa was inspired by Moore’s poem and has survived for more than 140 years.

And now we’ve arrived where a single stage can accommodate Jesus, Mary and Joseph, a rented donkey, three kings, Santa and his sleigh, shepherds, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and the guiding star in a polysemous pageant that can be both merry and happy, religious and secular.

But whether you take the above scriptural reading that traditionally appears on this page on this date as a matter of faith or of hope, it carries a message of charity that serves us all.

As complicated as the holiday may have become, its underlying message is simplicity itself: Peace on Earth, good will toward all.