The "Christmas season" has officially begun. This is so according to both the Christian calendar (yesterday was Advent Sunday) and the Capitalist calendar (Friday was "Black Friday"). Plus, Santa arrived safely at Macy's at the end of the Thanksgiving Day Parade, which is another way of keeping track of these things.
Last year we had two FM stations here in Philadelphia running the same mix of schmaltzy Christmas music all through December. This year, apparently to get a jump on their competitor, "Sunny 104.5" started its all-Christmas-all-the-time format the day after Halloween.
This premature celebration is annoying for a host of reasons. I don't expect corporate radio to respect the significance of Advent Sunday, but their disrespect for Miracle on 34th Street was surprising. I also think they're confusing cause and effect with regard to "holiday spirit." Hearing the umpteenth repetition of, say, Brenda Lee's "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" does not inspire feelings of sentimental warmth. It works the other way around. It is only because of the sentimental fuzziness and nostalgia we feel around the holidays that we are able to tolerate hearing that song even once.
Clear Channel's other "Sunny" stations are also following this all-Christmas format, including 102.7 Sunny FM in Lynchburg, Va.
Lynchburg is also home to Jerry Falwell's parachurch fiefdom, including his Thomas Road Baptist Church, Liberty University and "Liberty Counsel," the litigious reconfiguration of his earlier right-wing political organization The Moral Majority.
Falwell's latest fund-raising/attention-grabbing scheme is his "Friend or Foe Christmas Campaign." He claims to believe that Christmas is "under attack" from the same secular humanists he holds responsible for integrating the public schools, teaching science and otherwise trying to force God-fearing people to abide by their secular, Englightenment, Jeffersonian "Constitution."
Salon's Michelle Goldberg has an excellent dissection of this Defense of Christmas idea. It's a recycled version of a John Birch Society effort from the 1950s, Goldberg shows — one that followed Henry Ford's argument in a 1921 tract called "The International Jew."
It's worth sitting through the flash ad to read all of her article, "How the secular humanist grinch didn't steal Christmas." (The subtitle is: "The right-wing crusade against the liberal 'war on Christmas' is great for rallying the troops. Too bad the war doesn't exist.") Some highlights:
This year the war on Christmas canard has come early, and with it the latest opportunity for religious conservatives to cast themselves as the oppressed victims of secular tyrants. …
Despite [Alliance Defense Fund trial lawyer Mike] Johnson's lamentations, one can in fact offer Christmas greetings without legal counsel. Christmas trees are permitted in public schools. (They're considered secular symbols.) Nativity scenes are allowed on public property, although if the government erects one, it has to be part of a larger display that also includes other, secular signs of the holiday season, or displays referring to other religions. … Students are allowed to distribute religious holiday cards and literature in school. If the administration tries to stop them, the ACLU will step in to defend the students' free-speech rights, as they did in 2003 when teenagers in Massachusetts were suspended for passing out candy canes with Christian messages.
In fact, there is no war on Christmas. What there is, rather, is a burgeoning myth of a war on Christmas, assembled out of old reactionary tropes, urban legends, exaggerated anecdotes and increasingly organized hostility to the American Civil Liberties Union. …
Read the whole thing for the tasty quotes from Americhristians about the ACLU's reign of terror and the "counterrevolution" being fought for "Christian America."
Dr. Falwell is, of course, one of these counterrevolutionaries. Falwell also, apparently, does not listen to 102.7 Sunny FM. If he did, he'd find it harder to argue that the celebration of "Christmas" was under attack.
The Roanoke/Lynchburg station's Christmas playlist is nearly identical to that of its clone here in Philly. I subjected myself to 100 songs worth of its programming to see if, as Falwell argues, "Christmas" is losing ground to a generic "Seasons Greetings" or "Happy Holidays."
Here's a breakdown of those 100 songs:
Sacred carols: 28
"Merry Christmas" songs: 46
Santa songs: 9
Novelty songs: 3
Winter songs: 14
Songs with "Christmas" in the title: 34*
More than a fourth of the songs they're playing come straight out of the hymnal. That hardly seems to support Falwell's thesis that a secular conspiracy is "secularizing" Christmas.
But Falwell is claiming more than just that Christmas is being commercialized, or that what Linus called "the real meaning of Christmas" is being marginalized. Falwell is claiming that the phrase "Merry Christmas" and the word "Christmas" itself is under attack.
This is preposterous.
Tune in to 102.7 and you'll hear that word and that phrase over and over again. And although it's been said many times, many ways, it will be repeated three more times before the end of the chorus.
The all-Christmas-music radio format — replicated in every Clear Channel market — proves that Falwell doesn't have a clue what he's talking about. Or at least that Falwell doesn't much care whether or not what he preaches is true.
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* I'm including "Feliz Navidad." You know, Jose Feliciano, ya got no complaints.
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