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Friday, March 29
The Indiana Daily Student

opinion oped editorial

EDITORIAL: The 'War On Christmas' is fake news

trump-christmas-illo.jpg

President Trump has been promising to bring the phrase “Merry Christmas” back into the White House since he was on the campaign trail but failed to realize an important fact: those two words never left. 

The Obama family used the phrase frequently during their White House residency, indicating to the Editorial Board that Trump’s promise is nothing but empty pandering to his conservative Christian supporters.  

The biggest threat to Christmas is not any politically correct liberal agenda or secularized coffee cup but the rampant consumerism Trump, himself, displays.

Historically, most attacks on Christmas have come from different sects of Christianity itself, such as when Puritans in Boston banned traditional Christmas foods and forced children to still go to school on Dec. 25, 1647, fearing that the pagan influence of Saturnalia, the Roman festival many Christmas traditions originate from, was corrupting their holy day. 

Another anonymous poem, written circa 1624, references the post-Reformation Protestant ban of Christmas festivities as it laments how “Christmas bread and beef is turned into stones and silken rags.”

If Christmas could survive the last 400 years of this so-called war, it should take no issue with a plain red coffee cup.  

There are two Christmases being celebrated around the world each year: the consumerist Christmas dependent on storefront advertisements in mid-November and $1 trillion of U.S. holiday spending, or the holiday celebrating, as Pope Francis said in his 2016 Christmas message, “not the power of this world, based on might and wealth,” but “the power of love.”

In a world plagued by Trump-brand steaks, golf courses, hotels, casinos, TV shows, beauty pageants and suits, it seems apparent which holiday President Trump speaks of when he wishes the nation “Merry Christmas.”

According to a 2013 study from the Pew Research Center, the holiday is still celebrated by nearly 90 percent of the nation, even among those who do not consider themselves religious.

If Christmas is in any real jeopardy, the danger comes only from the money-impacted bowels of Trump’s own White House, now home to artificial trees garnished with garish $45 Trump cap tree ornaments and filled with Melania’s spooky decorations that seem to forebode the arrival of Krampus or the White Witch more so than any elf or present-toting Kris Kringle.

The threat comes from the disastrous tax overhaul incidentally designed to overflow the coffers of the already rich and the growing wave of support for an alleged pedophile’s Senate campaign. 

It comes from the repealed environmental legislation that will yield snowfall laden with pollutants and carcinogens. 

It comes from the upheld travel ban and proposed border wall that will keep families from celebrating with their loved ones.

The biggest danger to the holiday is consumerism and cash-grabs, many of which come from Trump himself.

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