Have a Holly, Jolly Holiday

What is to be made of all this?

Byrd says the attention to other traditions, the growing complexity of American life, is frustrating to some Christians, who grew up accustomed to Christmas being the preeminent holiday.

"It's the concept of the majority, and what rights they have to define American holidays, about what it means to be an American," Byrd says. "The majority of Americans are Christians who celebrate Christmas, and yet there is a sense of alienation that they are still not able to dominate discourse."

And there is one problem with that pristine image of the American Ghost of Christmas Past, he and others say: It never quite existed. "White Christmas" -- which became one of the best-selling songs of all time -- was already lamenting a season "just like the ones I used to know" in 1939. The same year, entrepreneur Charles Howard opened one of the first Santa Claus schools, dismayed by the cynical crush of "bums, ham actors, and thousands of odd job men" who were cashing in by playing the man in red.

A Secular Christmas

Confrontations over Christmas are as old as the day itself. The Bible mentions Christ's birth in a manger, which brings the tradition of the star in the night, the three wise men and many others. But it was nearly 400 years after Christ died before church officials thought to make the date of birth a holiday. This was greatly complicated by the fact that no one knew the exact date. But in 395, church officials set it as Dec. 25, putting it amid a huge pagan festival in ancient Rome known as Saturnalia. The latter was a raucous celebration -- lots of alcohol and sex -- that church officials allowed to continue as a means of attracting converts.

"That made sure the holiday would be observed, but it gave up any real Christian control over it," says Stephen Nissenbaum, author of "The Battle for Christmas."

Across northern Europe, there were pagan celebrations that stemmed from the dark, fallow days of the winter solstice. As Christianity spread, the two often overlapped, even as Europeans began to settle America. The Puritans were horrified at the combination. Finding no mention of Dec. 25 in their Bibles, they banned the holiday as sacrilegious.

"People drank a lot, caroused in the street," says Leigh Schmidt, professor of religion at Princeton University and author of "Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays." "Puritans thought Christmas was the worst day in the year to preach Christ, because people showed up at church after imbibing a lot of rum."

The founding fathers had no Santa Claus (Saint Nicholas, a minor European saint, did not morph into the current image of the gift-laden Santa Claus until the 1820s). There were no Christmas trees (a German import that didn't take root until the 1840s). Dec. 25 wasn't made a federal holiday under the first 17 American presidents (including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Abraham Lincoln). The holiday did not come until 1870, under Ulysses Grant, perhaps one of the least pious of presidents.

As the decades passed, Christmas became a holiday that celebrated the values of home and hearth and family and generosity, not just a Christian rite. There was Santa and the magic of childhood, a particularly Victorian ideal, that went alongside the Christian underpinning.

By the early 1900s, when companies began to learn how much they could commercially exploit the Santa Claus magic (Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer began life as a Montgomery Ward advertising gambit) the modern idea of Christmas was born.

Today, secular Hollywood gives us Christmas shows and Christmas specials without end, not to mention Christmas-themed movies. It is virtually impossible to walk into a commercial enterprise in America this week and not be overwhelmed with Christmas symbolism.

Which, says Staver, the Liberty Counsel president, is exactly the point. If stores are going to profit from Christmas, then they should at least acknowledge the day itself. Calling the evergreen tree in the lobby a "holiday tree" is a needless insult, he says.

"It's so obvious, removing the word 'Christmas.' It made a non-controversial issue controversial," he says. He speaks by cell phone from the steps of the federal courthouse in Jacksonville, Fla., where he has filed a request for an emergency injunction to allow a man to install a nativity scene in a public park between two tiny beachfront municipalities. "You come down to the question of 'Why?' Nobody renames Santa Claus or Hanukkah or Rudolph. A Christmas tree is a Christmas tree. It is exclusive to one thing. To say otherwise is contrary to history. It's an invention."

Historically speaking, academics and scholars agree, he's right: It is a Christmas tree.

You wonder if the Deity thinks that is the point. Or, perhaps, if it misses it entirely.