Religion: Christ in Christmas

Christmas to the vast throngs is little more than a noisy excuse for meretricious salesmanship, for urging one & all to buy unwanted presents for their friends, to the profit of the dollar-hungry. For a month before the Feast, the cry is: ‘Buy! Adeste Fideles. Nylons for your lady! . . . It Came Upon the Midnight Clear. What came, Mummy? Santa Claus, my dar-lings.’ ” So writes sharp-penned Canon Bernard Iddings Bell in the current Faith and Thought, bulletin of the Episcopal faculty and students at the University of Chicago. The deChristianizing of Christmas was also troubling other Christians last week. In Milwaukee, the community was trying to do something about it.

More than 200 Milwaukee merchants had launched a cooperative drive, sparked by the “Milwaukee Archconfraternity of Christian Mothers,” a Roman Catholic group which has already plastered city buses and streetcars with 1,200 posters bearing its slogan: Put Christ Back Into Christmas. Starting Dec. 11, some 275 taxicabs will display pictures of the Nativity. Hotel and theater marquees will carry the slogan, as will 160 billboards, automobile stickers and daily radio and TV announcements.

The campaign, backed by Lutherans, Episcopalians, and many Jews who feel that Christmas should be restored to its religious meaning, will stress the remaining weeks of Advent as a time of preparation by penance and prayer. Said Mrs. Fred J. Vollmar, chairman of the St. Boniface Archconfraternity, last week: “We must become more Christ-minded about Christmas . . . We have given prominence to a worldly Santa Claus—who has no resemblance to St. Nicholas—and have entirely left out the thought of the birth of the Savior.”