The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas (21 page)

Chapter 39
A Day in the Life of a Godless Magazine

C
ASPAR
M
ELVILLE AND
P
AUL
S
IMS

New Humanist
MAGAZINE

Flecks of snow, each one resplendent in its absolute uniqueness, swirled around his head, and the charred aroma of chestnuts roasting on an open fire filled his nose as the young news editor made his way through the now almost deserted street of the city to his cramped desk in the Blasphemy Lab, high up in the draughty garret of Godless Towers, for a century the headquarters of English heresy.

It was Christmas Eve, and he was late. Late for the crisis editorial meeting called by his splenetic but brilliant boss, Ebenezer Jazzfunk, the editor of
Unbelief Bi-monthly
, the market leader among humanist and rationalist magazines in this part of the country, with but one modest mission: to dismantle several millennia of monotheism. Ebenezer would not be pleased.

Squeezing past the overflowing boxes of past issues and inexplicably unsold copies of
Is a Fideistic Theology Irrefutable?
, he tried in vain to slip unnoticed into the meeting room, where the emergency session had already commenced, but an intemperate advancing of the door knocked loose an errant box of copies of
Rationalism and Population Explosion: Was Swift on to Something?
, which hit Jazzfunk square on the head, alerting him in no uncertain terms to the belated arrival of his assistant.

“So, you are here!” the editor boomed, somewhat redundantly. “Well, catch up, boy.” The meeting, he explained, constituted an attempt to avert the single biggest crisis in humanist publishing since the Battle of Conway Hall. The problem? Well, it concerned the Christmas issue, more properly (though perhaps less pithily) known in these part as the “late December annual holiday celebration issue.” Weeks of assiduous labor, the editor explained, had dredged up an issue of quite brilliant erudition. There was the compelling memoir “My Life as an Ardent Atheist but Also Extremely Moral Pe
rson,” by Cynthia Puffer; the debut of a new rationalist advice column, “Just Bloody Well Grow
Up and Stop Moaning”; and, lest we forget, this was the issue that would see a special children’s supplement titled “Why Mom and Dad Lie: Ten Reasons Father Christmas Definitely Does Not Exist.”

“But,” roared the editor, as the skeleton of a pigeon, knocked loose by the snow, fell into the fire grate, “we have still not proven the nonexistence of God. We lack that killer lead story, that hook-laden, pithy tour de force that will finally, this December 25, succeed in wrenching the Christ from Christmas. And you,” he said, turning to the news editor, “are the man for it. As you know, for very rational historical reasons I cannot now recall, we keep the front page open until last thing on Christmas Eve for the lead story. You are to find that story. You are to steal C
hristmas. And see that you do or you will find yourself seconded to the Humanist, Rationalist, Agnostic, and Ethical Kindred Liaison Committee come January.”

And with that (and ten minutes spent stuffing papers into his bag, struggling into his tweed overcoat, and trying but failing to conceal from his trembling but nonetheless scornful assistant the fact that his pockets were stuffed with Christmas presents for his grandchildren, all neatly wrapped in paper bearing small but still distinguishable pictures of wise men, angels, and a cowshed with a comet overhead) the editor was gone.

Christ Almighty!
the news editor thought.
I’d better get on with it
. And with that he immediately went to work, employing that trusty time-honored journalistic research tool, Twitter. It wasn’t long before his plaintive cry was popping up on Tweetdecks across the metropolis: “I’ve only got eight hours to prove that God doesn’t exist—any ideas?”

Almost instantly a message was fired back: “Walking down the high street, for my usual Twinings lapsang souchong and a madeleine. Snow is ethereal, isn’t it?” It was clear that Stephen Fry was going to be no help.

His mind wandered back over the eventful yet strangely tedious year he had spent at
Unbelief Bi-monthly
after graduating with a double second from Bejesus College, Cambridge.

Time was short.
Think! Think!
He saw the telephone. For some reason it reminded him of a conversation he had had, not three months previously, on a telephone. He’d been in charge of answering the office phone ever since the receptionist had not been hired yet. It had rung insistently before the news editor obliged and answered.

“Unbelief Bi-monthly
.”

“I’ve received a copy of your magazine,” said the lady on the other end. “And I demand to be removed from your mailing list at once.”

“Well . . . er . . . that’s no problem at all,” said the news editor. “Can I take your name . . . ?”

“Well, it wasn’t addressed to me. I object to receiving something through my door that insults God in this way.”

“Whom was it addressed to?”

“The man who lived here before me. He passed away, and I dread to think what has happened to his soul. How dare you send something like this to me!”

“But it wasn’t intended for you and—”

“I don’t know how you live with yourself.”

“I’ll ensure you’re removed from the mailing list. I’m sorry you received it.”

“It’s not me you should be apologizing to!” She slammed the phone down.

Remembering that call, he knew the telephone would be no use. Glancing up at the office clock, which though fairly accurate in terms of time had all the numbers in a random order because it had been bought on the cheap from the shop nearby run by a blind watchmaker, the news editor realized time was running out.

There was nothing for it. He would have to risk everything and delve into the green ink file. This file, more of a folder really, or ring binder, or plastic wallet, had been treated by a succession of editors mainly as a scribble pad and a place to put cups of tea, and was basically ignored when it wasn’t being openly denounced. This was where generations of godless editors kept their holy grails: the readers’ letters.

The news editor felt trepidation as he ferreted under a pile of Norwegian Humanist brochures and the journals produced by the formidable FreeSecs Union, formed by a recent merger of the National Freethinkers and Ethical Secularists. The green ink file was sacrosanct, but that alone was no reason to befoul it. Yet he had no choice. If the final proof of God’s nonexistence existed, it would exist here, somewhere among the unpaid bills and cries of outrage at that article claiming that wearing bright red lipstick was a profoundly humanist act.

The news editor spotted some familiar handwriting. The editors had long ignored the weekly postcards whose author signed not with a name but a symbol and which proclaimed, “Blood and urine tests prove we come from apes and that all holy texts are lies.” Given his sacred quest, the news editor read the headline with a new urgency. He felt an almost otherworldly sense of destiny.

“I have just today,” said the card, “asked the Home Secretary to arrest the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Queen for deception. In my letter to the Home Secretary I explained how blood and urine tests show that we come from apes.” Pay dirt.

But his elation turned to dust and ashes when a call to Scotland Yard revealed that both the Queen and the Archbishop remained at large.

Then his attention was caught by a letter headed “Suggestions for improving
Unbelief Bi-monthly
.” “Dear Editor,” the letter began. “
Unbelief Bi-monthly
is not sufficiently sexy or lighthearted,
when one considers newspapers such as the
Daily Sport
, the
Sun
, and the
Daily Star
, which all contain pictures of pretty girls. I hope
Unbelief Bi-monthly
would become more sexy/humorous, in line with society in general.” Attached to the letter were clippings from various publications, which did indeed contain pictures of pretty girls. Could this be the answer the news editor was looking for?

After briefly considering a humanist Page Three, instinct told the news editor to move on, and he dug into the mailbag once more. He skipped past the one titled “Four Hezbollah Anagrams” (Hello H Baz, L H Haze Lob, Ha Boz Hell, and Blah Z H
ole) and another requesting a written reply proving that God didn’t exist (“I’m sorry to have written a letter, but sadly I do not have an e-mail machine”) and alighted on a letter whose author claimed to have hit upon proof of creationism—perhaps this would be the biggest scoop of all. Imagine if the news editor, in his quest to prove the nonexistence of God, instead unearthed proof of God! “Most people think that fossils are proof of evolution, but this is not the case,” explained the author. “Fossils and dinosaur bones are a side effect of creation. When God created mankind and other cre
atures, the fossils automatically appeared because the created world must work logically. Dinosaurs never existed but dinosaur fossils do.”

The news editor was beginning to despair. It was 3:00 p.m. on Christmas Eve, and he was no closer to establishing how this godless magazine was going to prove God’s nonexistence. Taking one final dip into the mailbag, he pulled out a letter from a prospective contributor to the magazine, offering a piece of fiction for publication.
Unbelief Bi-monthly
rarely published fiction, but he read on in hope. The brief synopsis carried the title “The Turtles and the Gulf Crisis” and described itself as “a story about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the Persian Gulf crisis.” The author had taken the
trouble to explain the leap of imagination that had led him to this tale: “The reason I have put the Turtles and the Gulf crisis together is because they seem to go together. They are contemporaneous and seem to share the same mentality. The story is told in a serious tone, not tongue in cheek. I think it is more effective that way.”

It was no use.

The final editorial meeting was fast approaching, a meeting that Ebenezer Jazzfunk had proudly declared, on his recent Sunday morning appearance on the B
BC’
s flagship faith show
Debates Between People Who Will Never Agree
, would be “the final editorial meeting of the theistic age.” The news editor scuttled into the meeting room and prepared for Jazzfunk’s final judgment.

He found the editor in resigned mood. “Don’t tell me,” he said. “You didn’t find it. Don’t worry, lad, it’s the same every year. We’
ll just have to go with the same front page we ran last year—‘Jolly Festi-wintervus to Everyone.’ Now, who’s for eggnog?”

Note: While the story itself is fictional, all correspondence listed was genuinely received by
New Humanist
.

Chapter 40
Front Line in the War on Christmas

A
NDREW
S
HAFFER

“Merry Christmas or happy holidays? Which strategy should retailers use to cash in? Here for a fair and balanced debate is Andrew Shaffer, owner of the Order of St. Nick greeting card company,”
Fox & Friends
host Steve Doocy said to the television audience.

It was 6:24 a.m. at the Fox News studios in New York—an early hour by anyone’s watch, but it was 5:24 a.m. in Des Moines, Iowa, from where I was live via satellite. My fiancée had grilled me late into the previous night with questions that we expected a Fox News host would ask an atheist, such as “Where are your horns?” and “Why do you hate America?” It had taken a hotel wake-up call, two cell phone alarms, a Red Bull, and a gas station coffee just to pry my eyes halfway open.

Greg Stielstra, a Christian marketing expert, joined the conversation from the
Fox & Friends
set. Greg’s position was that by using the secular greeting “happy holidays” in advertising and store displays instead of “merry Christmas,” retailers risk alienating a majority of their customers. This wasn’t semantics; this was war.

Greg:
Businesses play a numbers game. They carry the most popular products. They open their stores in the busiest intersections. If 96 percent of the population is celebrating Christmas and 77 percent consider themselves Christians, why wouldn’t you speak to Christmas as a retailer?

Steve:
All right. Andrew, what do you make of that argument?

Me:
I actually agree with that. I think that if you’re trying to reach the widest possible audience, that’s a great strategy.

The atheist and the Christian, finding common ground? The debate was over before it had even begun. It remains, to this day, three of the least riveting minutes of television ever produced by a major cable news channel (and that includes every episode of
Larry King Live
). It wasn’t a total disaster—at least I hadn’t fallen asleep on the air, something I’m pretty sure that Larry King
has
done.

While Christians are usually portrayed as the defensive side in the war on Christmas, they fired one of the first shots in 1870 when President Ulysses S. Grant signed a bill into law declaring Christmas Day a federal holiday.
²⁴
If this sounds to you like a possible violation of the constitutional separation of church and state, you’re not alone. Ohio lawyer Richard Ganulin sued the federal government in 1998 to have Christmas Day removed from the list of public holidays. The lawsuit was tossed out. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, upholding a lower court’s dismissal of Ganulin’s lawsuit, ruled that the 1870 law does not constitute an endorsement of Christianity by the government.

Case closed, right? Not so fast. State and local governments ar
e not required to recognize federal holidays. In the late twent
ieth century, city council and PTA meetings have become the de facto battlegrounds f
or the heart and soul of Christmas. If your children attend a p
ublic school in the United States, there is a reasonable chance they don’t tak
e two weeks off for Christmas break—it’s likely they’re being forc
ed to enjoy a “holiday break” or a “winter break” instead. Christians are “
asked to celebrate something they don’t celebrate—winter—as if they
are pagans in the Roman Empire,” Fox News host John Gibson wrote in
The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Ch
ristian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought.
²⁵

Gibson views the usage of “happy holidays” and “winter break” as evidence of a vast conspiracy to eliminate Christmas from the public sphere. The bad guys, it turns out, are not just “professional atheists”
²⁶
but are, in fact, “mostly liberal white Christians.” According to Gibson, the nefarious plot against Christianity is the work of ACLU lawyers, school superintendents, and city council members—many of whom are Christian—who are afraid of running afoul of the constitutional separation of church and state. They’ve taken the law into their own hands, rebranding Christmas trees as “friendsh
ip trees” and stopping children from handing out candy canes. One misguided soul even banned red and green decorations altogether in his school.

The Supreme Court has consistently protected expressions of Christmas on government property and in public schools. As long as a Christmas display is not entirely composed of religious symbols, for instance, court precedents point to letting things slide. This has led to the Supreme Court’s stance being mockingly nicknamed the “three-reindeer rule”—with enough reindeer, snowmen, and elves, the religiosity of a display can be diminished to acceptable levels.

The war on Christmas isn’t limited to skirmishes over the separation of church and state. Businesses are the latest grinches to enter the fray. Right-wing media had a proverbial field day with Walmart, Sears, and Target when the heathen corporations started using the
term “happy holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” in the 2000s. “I think it’s all part of the secular progressive agenda . . . to get Christianity and spirituality out of the public square,” Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly said. “Every company in America should be on its knees thanking Jesus for being born. Without Christmas, most American businesses would be far less profitable.” Conservative Christian groups now maintain lists of “naughty and nice” retailers that concerned citizens can consult to find out who’s celebrating Christmas and who’s celebrating “the holidays.”

By December 2005, Christmas was under siege from all sides: in our schools, in our town halls, and in our most hallowed grounds (retail stores). But at least the federal government still supported Christmas.

Then the unthinkable happened: President George W. Bush and First Lady Laura Bush sent a “holiday” card.

When the biggest, baddest Christians in America dropped the H-bomb on the 1.4 million people on their Christmas card list, all hope for the future of “merry Christmas” was lost. The white flag had finally been waved. As John Lennon wrote, “War is over now / Happy Xmas holidays.”

After the White House slight, the word
Christmas
suddenly felt dangerous and sexy. In 2007, I started Order of St. Nick, a greeting card company specializing in humorous Christmas cards. The most popular designs were a line of six tongue-in-cheek “atheist Christmas cards.”

By some estimates, up to 15 percent of Americans consider themselves atheist, agnostic, or otherwise unaffiliated with any religion. If 96 percent of Americans celebrate Christmas, that means there is a large segment of the population that Hallmark and American Greetings had never spoken to directly: Santa-loving, tree-decorating, carol-singing atheists like me.

The atheist Christmas cards struck a nerve. Comedian Stephen Colbert, host of Comedy Central’s
The Colbert Report,
gave me an on-air tongue-lashing that I will never forget:
²⁷

A wag of my finger at the Order of St. Nick greeting card company.

Now, I always thought that any card that was blank inside was already atheist. You open it up and see nothing but a void.

Once atheists start sending Christmas cards, how long before they are including their year-end atheist family updates? . . . “Sadly, Grandpa passed away this year, but at least we know he’s not in a better place. He’s decomposing. Merry Xmas.”

Order of St. Nick sold thousands of atheist Christmas cards after
The Colbert Report
aired. The cards didn’t mock Christianity or cry for attention with cheap shock value like the drawings of Santa Claus nailed to a cross that teenage atheists doodle in their notebooks every December.
²⁸
The Darwin-as-Santa image, by contrast, was a sincere expression of both my belief in atheism and Christmas’ unique ability to bridge the gap between believers and non-believers.

For many, Christmas is already a secular holiday; believing in the Christian God is no longer a requisite for celebrating the day of His birth. The world’s most famous non-believer, R
ichard Dawkins, exchanges gifts with his family and loves singing traditional Christmas carols. “I am perfectly happy on Christmas Day to say ‘Merry Christmas’ to everybody,” he told Radio 4’s
Today
program.

Dawkins is not alone. The Christmas season has become a time for families, regardless of religious affiliation, to get together, exchange gifts, eat cookies, and revel in “the hap-happiest time of the year.” Celebrating Christmas without subscribing to Christianity is like watching the Super Bowl without having watched a single regular-season football game all year. Some people watch the Super Bowl exclusively for the commercials; others watch it for the halftime show. NFL super-fans might turn their noses up at the party crashers, but I submit that there are some spectacles so awesome that
people can’t help but be sucked in by their gravitational pull. Christmas sits like a black hole on the calendar, and the other holidays implied by “happy holidays”—Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Boxing Day, New Year’s Day, etc.—are powerless to be drawn in by its force. No matter how thorough the semantic cover-up job we do, we all know the Holiday Whose Name We Shall Not Speak That Is Celebrated by 96 percent of Americans Every December.

Moreover, Christmas is no longer limited to countries with Christian majorities. Christmas is beginning to show up in places where Christianity has never taken hold, such as Japan and China. Several Chinese men and women I spoke with on a trip to Guangzhou, China, a few years ago recognized Santa Claus’ familiar visage . . . but they couldn’t pick the Baby Jesus out of a Nativity scene.
Secular Christmas is already here
. The “church and state” court cases, the verbal wrangling over “happy holidays”—the war on Christmas that is being fought primarily in the United States, Canada, an
d, to an extent, the United Kingdom—feels so
unnecessary
by comparison.

Even as an atheist, I feel some of Bill O’Reilly and John Gibson’s pain when the war on Christmas claims another town hall display or department store ad. Can’t we just back off the Baby Jesus? Hasn’t He been through enough already?
²⁹
Perhaps I’ve just been beaten into submission. Perhaps a more passionate atheist would not concede
points to a Fox News host and a faith-based marketer on national television. Perhaps I should take offense at Nativity scenes on city property; perhaps I should roll my eyes every time someone says that “Jesus is the reason for the season.”

But I’m an atheist, not a vampire. I don’t need to cringe at the sight of a cross in a school Christmas pageant. And Christmas has given all of us so much to be thankful for. Without Christmas, there would be no
It’s a Wonderful Life,
no
Miracle on 34th Street,
no
Die Hard
. We wouldn’t have Dickens’
A Christmas Carol
or Christopher Moore’s
The Stupidest Angel.
And, growing up, I would never have received so many Transformers, Nintendo video games, and JC Penney sweaters. Without the warm fuzzies created in our hearts by our collective Christmas spirit and shortened workweeks, seasonal a
ffective disorder would reach epidemic proportions every December in the Northern Hemisphere. As atheist Judith Hayes wrote, “Life is difficult and short. If we can add some merriment to it, we should go for it. Every time.” So, from one atheist to another, merry Christmas.