I often get accused of being a “Scrooge” this time of year, and I can’t say that reputation is undeserved.
The Christmas season does tend to bring out my worst side, but, as a veteran of the War on Christmas, you’ll forgive me if I occasionally lapse into PTHSD (post traumatic holiday stress disorder).
I served my tour of duty during the War on Christmas right next door at Auburn University, a campus so rigidly conservative in its political and religious beliefs that calling it a “bastion of Christendom” seems insufficient.
The War began here back in 2005, when then Auburn University College Republicans president Laura Steele and her minions became incensed at a name change for Auburn’s annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony.
Due to some changes in the ceremony itself (including the addition of a menorah and other non-Christmas tree lighting fixtures), the SGA thought it wise to change the name of the ceremony to the “Holiday Tree Lighting Ceremony.”
Steele and her followers became incensed, declaring that Auburn was “trying to take the Christ out of Christmas” and even made it onto Fox News, where anchor Sean Hannity helped add further fuel to the fire.
Due to Steele’s impassioned response, the SGA later formed a student committee, the Holiday Tree Lighting Committee, to address the issue and try to form a “less provocative” name.
Because of my position in the student media at Auburn (and the fact that the sitting Plainsman editor made me), I was named to the committee but tried hard not to interfere with its workings.
The only suggestion I ever made was that the committee’s initial idea of renaming it the “Festival of Lights” might be problematic, as that nomenclature is already in use by the Jewish faith (Hanukkah) and Hindus (Diwali).
When my involvement with the committee became public, Steele’s replacement at the AUCR, Auburn’s own Kristi Cottrell, was angered and demanded my removal from the group, as she was certain I would be up to no good, what with my horrid political correctness and all.
What she had to fear from an Opelikan who was raised Southern Baptist at Opelika’s First Baptist Church is beyond my comprehension, but, due to my title as president of the College Democrats, I was, apparently, suspect and probably a pinko Commie, too.
Rather than cause more unnecessary fuss, I gladly accepted their forced resignation, but not before the story was picked up by the local daily paper, which ran the story on its front page.
Ever since then, I have always gotten at least two or three comments made to me about that debacle each Christmas season – people asking if I was going to rename it a “Kwanzaa bush” or a “Saturnalia Spruce” ... as if Douglas firs were a regular feature of first-century Judea.
Now, every time I hear of some new report or way that Christmas is being “persecuted” here in America, I can’t help but roll my eyes.
There is legitimate persecution in this world: Christians being jailed for publicly professing their faith in countries like China and North Korea, believers being targeted and killed in countries like Egypt and Syria simply for attending their churches. Someone saying “Happy Holidays” to you instead of your preferred “Merry Christmas” is not persecution, even though some of you try to stretch the definition of “persecution” to make it so.
The phrase “Happy Holidays” does not stop you from freely worshipping God in your chosen fashion. It does not oppress you or try to stifle you in any fashion.
Take a look at what other believers have to go through across the world, and then fall to your knees in contemplative prayer to thank God for the blessing of being born in this country.
We really ought to consider ourselves lucky that the idiotic “Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays” battle is apparently what passes for “persecution” here. Were that our friends in the Far East were so lucky.
I hope you all had a pleasant Christmas and I wish you all a pleasant New Year ... or, in other words: Happy Holidays.
A native Opelikan, Cliff McCollum is an amateur field herpetologist, news editor and chicken salad mogul.
