It’s 12 Days of Christmas Season. That’s the time of marketing extravaganza’s referencing that very well known carol, “The Twelve Days of Christmas” in which the the suitor gives his true love strange things like turtle doves, golden rings enough for each finger of one hand, ladies dancing, pipers and, of course, that partridge in the pear tree.
Share The 12 Days Of Christmas by Gregg Smith Singers
Manufacturers, retailers and companies and service providers promote their businesses by sponsoring talk show giveaways for 12 days on Ellen or Oprah or by special giveaways and sales each day for 12 days at their stores or online as is being done by Starbucks and AT&T. It comes anytime before Christmas, depending on the broadcast schedule of the show and when the company needs sales.

What the 12 days of Christmas actually refers to however, is the liturgical Christmas Season between the day the birth of Jesus is celebrated, December 25 and the Epiphany, twelve days later, when the visit of the three wise men is celebrated. Epiphany has a great deal of significance in the liturgical calendar. In some Christian cultures it is the day that children get presents, and it used to be in many places, including a lot of American homes, that the tree was decorated on Christmas Eve and taken down on “Twelfth Night” or the Epiphany. Today that is all but forgotten.
It’s a well known fact among those who’ve studied the history of religion that when a new religion sweeps into a culture, it will appropriate or supplant the traditions of that culture, and this is especially the case with a new religion. It’s likely that the date of Christmas in the Calendar was chosen to take some of the steam out of Winter Solstice celebrations, for example. And certainly many of the rituals and symbols such as the Christmas tree that we consider such an important part of the holiday are definitely pre-Christian holdovers.
So today, in the appropriation of the 12 days of Christmas and its relocation on the calendar to wherever it provides the best marketing opportunity, are the business interests appropriating Christmas for the religion of consumerism? In our society happiness is believed to be achieved through personal enrichment and accumulation of things. Increasingly everything can also be subsumed in that belief system, commodified, quantified, valued, bought and sold.
It is incredibly ironic that those who cry about a War on Christmas and who constantly flaunt their piety in public are not concerned that the meaning of the holiday is lost in this frenzy of consumerism. Instead they search for isolated incidents at which which some religious display is ordered removed from a town square.
And they go into a fit over the expression Happy Holidays frantically seeking about employees who may have been told to tell their customers that and who are willing to get up in arms about it on camera.
Sadly, the expression Happy Holidays is simply a kindly effort to be inclusive. There are two holidays Christians celebrate in this season, Christmas and New Years. Three if you count Epiphany. Happy Holidays includes them all.
It is also a magnanimous gesture to non-Christians, be they Jews, Muslims, Hindus, agnostics and atheists. As I have argued before in this blog, it is not polite to wish someone Happy Birthday on your birthday and not theirs. Similarly, you don’t with non-Christians Merry Christmas. But everyone celebrates the New Year and many religions have some holiday around Christmas time. Happy Holidays is a kind, generous expression. One might even say, Christian!
The fact is that you can’t take Christ out of CHRISTmas. It’s in the word, But to insist that people say Merry Christmas instead of Happy Holidays, or to intimidate municipalities, schools or officials into displaying nativity scenes or other religious propoganda is much more reminiscent of Saudi Arabia or another country where they have religious police, and not the USA!
But who cares? Just shut up and shop. It’s what Jesus wants.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
The Gretch Who Saved the War on Christmas
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