It is, perhaps, ironic that the people who bray on and on about the War on Christmas every winter tend to be Christian. Who else, after all, thinks that substituting the words “happy holidays” for “merry Christmas” could make the baby Jesus weep—and during his birthday month, no less?? Conservative Christian pundits foaming at the mouth over Starbucks cups or the re-litigating of old Christmas tunes is now almost as much an annual tradition as caroling. But the fact is, the first shots in the War on Christmas were actually fired by the Jesus set.
In the mid-17th century, the government of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, one of the early Puritan settlements in what would become the United States, banned the celebration of Christmas. The Puritans, who had fled persecution by the Anglican majority in England, considered any feasts that had been established by the Anglican Church unholy, Jesus’s alleged birthday included. They weren’t crazy about the Pagan undertones either—Christmas is closely connected with the winter solstice—and so anyone caught celebrating Christmas, according to an early colony law book, could be subjected to a five-shilling fine.
The descendants of those Puritans now work at Fox News, where they spend every December trying to convince their viewers that Muslims, Jews, and atheists have put aside their differences to wage a holy battle against Christmas. It’s a ludicrous supposition: Muslims, Jews, and atheists are far too busy arguing about the future of Israel on Twitter to actually fight in the War on Christmas. I, however, am not.
The War on Christmas is a guerrilla war, and I’ve been on the front lines now for almost a decade. I’m not a descendant of the Puritans (if my ancestors thought anything was holy, it was probably mead), but I’ve enlisted nonetheless, and my resistance most often takes the form of simply not participating. Instead, I like to treat Christmas like the Jews do: Ignore it, and go out for Chinese.
We all have our own motivations for joining up, but mine are simple: Christmas is expensive, time-consuming, and, most importantly, terrible for the blue planet we’re rapidly destroying.
Despite my position, I am aware that Christmas makes sense for the parents of young children. Children, generally speaking, are broke. They can’t buy their own shit, and so Christmas and birthdays are the rare times of year in which procuring new Nike Dunks or whatever doesn’t require either begging or shoplifting. For kids, it’s a hell of a deal. And from their parents’ perspective, there are benefits, too. Christmas, for one, is an excellent way to con your children into behaving. Little Aspen might not give a shit when you yell at him to stop holding a pillow over his baby sister’s face, but one reminder that Santa is watching, and the homicide attempts quickly dry up. What’s more, Christmas also provides a value lesson in disappointment, at least if you grew up in my family, where subscriptions to National Geographic were considered (and still are) the height of giving.
Still, it’s not like all these things are good for children. Not only does research suggest that excessive giving has a negative impact on kids, toys delivered this year will largely be forgotten by the time the tree’s packed away.
Christmas gift-giving makes even less sense among adults, who, generally speaking, can buy our own shit. Yes, you could wait for some second cousin to buy you an Instant Pot that you’ll use once and then let molder in your pantry for the next 20 years, or you could throw $89.99 in a paper shredder and the effect would be exactly the same. Besides, no one who buys me Christmas gifts can afford the houseboat on Lake Union that’s on my list, so what would really make my Christmas special would be saving the money I could spend on other people for myself.
And yet people, for some reason, seem to actually enjoy this holiday—and at no small cost to themselves. More than half of Americans say they will spend over $500 on just Christmas gifts alone. And that doesn’t include the cost of food and travel and trees and eggnog and all the therapy you’re going to need after a week at your in-law’s in Phoenix.
This year, over 100 million Americans are expected to travel over Christmas, which also happens to be the worst time of the year to travel. It would make far more sense to celebrate Jesus’s half-birthday in July, when you’re a hell of a lot less likely to get stuck in the Denver airport for days, and yet, we all load up the kids in the minivan or book cross-country flights for December.
Besides the weather and the delays and the cost, which, of course, is significantly marked up over Christmas, all this the travel has a serious impact on our planet. One round-trip cross-country flight, for instance, generates about 0.9 metric tons of carbon dioxide per person. That’s about a fifth of the energy a typical car emits in an entire year. In fact, flying emits so much carbon that it would be more efficient to drive your family across the country in a Humvee than it would be to fly. Of course, then you’d be stuck in a car with your family for an extended period of time, a gift no one in their right mind wants for Christmas, but at least you wouldn’t be pumping quite as much carbon into the atmosphere.
Now, I understand the need to celebrate. Most humans, for some reason, enjoy ritual and lights and eating together and spending time with their families. But the cost of Christmas—both to ourselves and our planet—is simply too great to continue this tradition, at least in the form that it exists today. And this form is new: Until the Industrial Revolution made mass-market trinkets and toys possible, Christmas time gift-giving was limited for all but the very rich. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, however, manufacturers and marketers saw that Christmas could be a huge annual windfall, and by the time the Coca-Cola company began running ads with a jolly, rotund Santa Claus in the Saturday Evening Post, Christmas, and all that came with it, was everywhere. Nearly a century later, the cost of Christmas in the U.S. tops $1 trillion each year. And sure, some of that money does go to small businesses, but more and more, our Christmas spending winds up in the coffers of exactly one Seattle-based online retailer.
For a lot of people, especially in the U.S., Christmas may seem as integral to our world as gravity. But the truth it, there’s nothing inevitable about it at all. For most of the past 2,000 years, it was Easter, not Christmas, that was the big Christian holiday, and Christmas exists in its current form because industry benefits and because we all play along, buying plane tickets and Xboxes and donning ugly sweaters and pretending there’s something inherently special about this time of year.
There is, however, a way out of this cycle that would save us all time, money, energy, and would lessen this impact of this terrible holiday on the planet—and it wouldn’t even require us to give up Christmas entirely. I propose that instead of marking Christmas each and every year, we start to celebrate it every four years instead, like the Olympics. We could free ourselves from the waste and the obligation and the annual arguments about whose parents we’re going to visit. We could save all the money we’d waste on presents nobody wants on things we actually need (say… retirement). We could stay put in December, when conditions are worst, and go on vacation in the spring or summer instead. And because Christmas will be rare, it will be even more meaningful for those who choose to celebrate. Who will have won the War on Christmas? All of us, because instead of engaging in silly cultural battles about Starbucks cups and old songs and the true meaning of Christmas each and every December, we’ll set aside the treaty and fire up the cannons only once every four years instead.
