Putting “Christ” in “Black Friday.”

Social conservatives will soon be “trying to take Christmas back” or to “put Christ in Christmas.” Perhaps they’ll be calling, again, for boycotts of stores that don’t say “Merry Christmas.”

I’ll not be joining them. Because it isn’t “the Christmas season.” It’s Advent (West) or Nativity Lent (East) – and Nativity Lent is, as the name suggests, a penitential season (the West seems to have abandoned any sense of the penitential in Advent).

Yes, Christmas starts on December 25, not on “Black Friday” (which incredibly doesn’t fall on the liturgical calendar at all! Neither does Super Bowl Sunday!), and continues for twelve days. Remember? “Partridge in a pear tree”?

You just have irony heaped upon irony. First Baptist Church of Dallas right now [as of December 10, 2010] is trying to create a list of stores that are refusing to use the word “Christmas,” and asking their members to boycott them. The irony is, of course, that they’re doing all of this completely out of the ancient calendar … The irony is they’re already celebrating Christmas according to the shopping mall’s calendar while protesting that they’re “losing Christmas.”

Terry Mattingly of GetReligion.org on the Crossroads podcast (last year).

I just am not mischievous enough to feign offense at merchants not wishing me “Merry Christmas” during this Baptized-by-Protestants commercial bacchanalia. (And I always thought – add yet another irony – it was we historic Christians who allegedly had baptized pagan celebrations!)

Mattingly has a “bucket list” that includes getting arrested for his own version of “putting Christ in Christmas”: caroling at the Mall during the actual Christmas season, and asks “How can you ‘put Christ in Christmas’ if you can’t even put ‘Christmas’ in Christmas?”