The month of December heralds an annual explosion of religious symbolism across public America, typically centered on Christmas decorations.
While the celebration of Christmas has never been a simple issue in America (the Puritans famously banned Christmas, and the first Christmas tree wouldn’t be put up in Cambridge, MA, until the nineteenth century), in recent decades the trend of public decorations and celebrations has created both opportunities and tensions for religious communities.
On the one hand, every year seems to bring new ideas for multifaith winter-and-light-themed celebrations, with an ever-increasing roster of religious traditions. And yet, on the other hand, the onset of winter also brings new cases of religious outrage, be it the snow-flake-free red Starbucks cups or the safety hazard of trees in college dorms.
How does, or how should, modern America celebrate in December? Diana L. Eck, director of Harvard’s Pluralism Project and professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies at HDS, who has been a leading voice in American religious diversity for decades, spoke recently about some of the work she has done in navigating the religious controversies that pop up around the holidays, or what she deems "the December Dilemmas."
Have you seen the discourse around public Christmas celebrations change since you began working on this issue?
Oh, tremendously. I grew up in Montana, and we had Christmas pageants in the school, and nobody thought of it as a problem. Now they do, and they don't have that anymore. People are thinking about these issues, but there are places in this country where they still do this. There has just never been a plaintiff, there are many places where there has never been anybody to come forward and say that maybe this shouldn't be done in this way.
Of course, a lot of the controversy this time of year happens around issues more subtle than Christian pageants.
Yes, the greening of everything at holiday time is its own thing. Our first case study for the Pluralism Project was on the Great Wreath Controversy. The Weston Garden Club for years had been putting wreaths on the public schools for the holiday. And some people outside the club began to ask why they were putting up evergreen wreaths at Christmas time. They wondered if that was bringing a more specific holiday nature into the public schools. The Garden Club of course was very offended—they were insistent that no, these are wreaths, this isn't about Christmas. These are just wreaths. Eventually, I think they stopped the wreaths. There was a sense that maybe public schools shouldn't be decorated in quite that way.
The detangling of the American identity from the Christian identity, or winter symbols from Christmas symbols, isn't very easy. I imagine it's even more complicated in places where the majority of people are in fact celebrating Christmas.
Definitely. We had a case in Vermont where there was only one Jewish family, and they had a son in the school, and they spoke to the principal about reindeer decorations that were used in the school, which they felt were religiously specific. And the principal felt it necessary to immediately go and remove all the reindeer, and it caused a huge controversy. Parents started coming to the PTA meetings with reindeer ears. Many of these issues that are posed around the holiday season are public issues, like whether to say "Merry Christmas" and how much Christmas language is out there.
The language has been a big issue. There is a lot of pushback against "Merry Christmas" as a standard greeting in December. And yet, the response typically hasn't been to go religiously neutral, but religiously broader. A lot of stores, for example, opt for the seemingly more inclusive "Happy Holidays." But is that really more inclusive?
It is and it isn't—people will say Christmas, but what they mean is a much broader spectrum of things. In a lot of ways, when it comes to the advent season for example, many people take it simply as the countdown to Christmas, even though it really is a penitential season. I think there are a lot of Christians who have gotten a deluded version of Christmas as well.
Commercialization has becomes the biggest energy of the season. There is so much commerce. But on the other hand, what you're talking about is an inclusion of sweeping everything into this Holiday pile. And that just happened. And there is Hannukah and Bodhi Day—or Buddha's Enlightenment Day—that comes during this time as well, and so it all went in together.
Do you think holiday language will disappear from public schools entirely?
It's in the cultural DNA, these holidays, so you're not going to be able to erase that. But I think the thing is to use them as part of the educational system. This is good opportunity for education. The U.S. Department of Education in its guidelines has been very clear about educating and not celebrating—posters and the like should be clearly educational, not devotional. So nothing celebratory about it, no bringing in cookies that celebrate the holidays or things like that, but having actual discussion of what these holidays are.
As Master of Lowell House, how does this come up around holiday decorations for the house?
We have a house committee, and if they want to have this or that, they will be the people who will decide. There was a year when we had two Hindu students who were head of the house committee and they insisted we have a big tree, and so we did and then it became custom.
But the way in which we deal with it, or I deal with it, especially as a historian of religion, is to think about the old pagan substructure that is part of all of this. A lot of things that we do in this time are the inheritance of pagan culture. We have a Yule log dinner, for example, in which we bring a big Yule log into the fireplace in the dining hall and talk about all the soothsaying that went with burning these big logs and the kindling that went with it.
Does discussing that substructure and cultural background connect with more of your students?
I think so. There is a lot of the solstice business that's very powerful. It is inherent, and built into the seasons of nature. It's good to have some alternate vocabulary for some of this stuff.
—by Shira Telushkin