"No matter who I asked, they'd say, 'We're celebrating the season,' or 'We're celebrating the holiday'," said Corkish, pastor of Anchor Baptist Church in Holladay. "It's almost like people have been asked not to say, 'Merry Christmas.' I've been a pastor for 50 years and I've never seen anything like it."
Corkish joins an emerging chorus of religious conservatives and commentators who, bothered by what they see as a secular watering down of a Christian holiday, want to put the Christ back in Christmas. These groups contend that a fear of offending non-Christians has led retailers, schools and government agencies to ignore Christmas' biblical roots in favor of folk symbols like Santa Claus or generic phrases such as "Happy Holidays."
This debate flares each December, but in recent months the outcry has gotten louder than ever. They even have a term for this supposed anti-Christmas bias: the "war on Christmas," named for a new book by Fox News Channel anchor John Gibson, whose subtitle is, How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday is Worse Than You Thought.
Boycotts, card controversies: Others are heeding his battle cry. Republican lawmakers led a successful effort to rename the U.S. Capitol Holiday Tree as the Capitol Christmas Tree. A Folsom, Calif., man launched a Web site, http://www.
savemerrychristmas.org, to organize boycotts of retailers who don't use "Christmas" in their advertising. The Alliance Defense Fund, a conservative legal group, has begun a campaign to preserve people's rights to sponsor public nativity scenes or lead schoolchildren in Christmas carols. Its slogan: "Merry Christmas. It's OK to say it."
"There is a war over Christmas, and the reason for that is that there's a war over Christianity," said Corkish, who blames such groups as the American Civil Liberties Union for making people overly sensitive to the country's minority religions. "They want to give everybody free speech except the Christians."
Members of the religious right, who view President Bush as one of their own, have even voiced dismay at this year's official White House Christmas card, which wishes 1.4 million of Bush's closest supporters a happy "holiday season." Never mind that the generic greeting is the same one the Bushes have sent every December since he took office in 2001.
By contrast, no fuss has been made over Utah Gov. Jon M. Huntsman Jr.'s official holiday card, which wishes recipients a "wonderful holiday season." Although the card makes no reference to Christmas and shows Huntsman and his family in what looks like a summertime photo, the governor has received no complaints about its content, said spokesman Mike Mower. The Huntsmans display a Christmas tree and a menorah at the Governor's mansion, he added.
Holidays in the schools: The debate over public celebrations of Christmas traces its roots to legal battles over how religious holidays are observed in American public schools. Before schools' policies on the issue were challenged in recent decades, teachers often imposed Christmas holiday customs on non-Christian schoolchildren. Judy Donnell, a writer and editor who was raised as a Jew, says her kids were forced to sing Christian carols such as "Silent Night" in their Salt Lake City elementary school.
"For a child whose family doesn't celebrate Christmas, it's confusing," said Donnell, who lives in Salt Lake City. "They'd come home and say, 'Mommy, I had to write a paper on 'what Christmas means to me' and I didn't know what to write.' "
By the 1980s and 1990s, many school districts began to make changes in response to students of different faiths. The Davis County School District adopted a policy, lauded as an exemplary model, that instructs educators to teach about religious holidays without celebrating them. The policy also encourages teachers to discuss non-Christian religious or cultural holidays, such as Hanukkah or Kwanzaa, that coincide with the Christmas season.
But some parents say schools have gone too far. Kelly Miller, whose daughter is a fourth-grader at Trailside Elementary in Park City, was upset when the school replaced its traditional Christmas concert last week with a "winter" concert featuring ethnic folk songs and traditionals such as "Over the River and Through the Woods."
"The closest thing to a Christmas song was 'Frosty the Snowman,' " said Miller, who complained to the school's principal. "This is not a religious issue for me - I don't even go to church. This is an issue about a beloved tradition. I just think it'd be nice to have Christmas back."
Martha Crook, Trailside's principal, said the school made no conscious decision to de-emphasize Christmas in its concert and that religious carols will still appear in future school programs. The songs sung last week were simply the ones that student choirs had learned this fall, she said.
"We try to be respectful to a variety of cultures and traditions," said Crook, adding that complaints about the concert were outnumbered by compliments from parents who enjoyed hearing new seasonal songs. "It's a balancing act."
Targeting the stores: The chief battlegrounds in this year's so-called "war on Christmas," however, are not schools but department stores. The 150,000-member American Family Association called for a boycott of Target stores the weekend after Thanksgiving, accusing the chain of banning the phrase "Merry Christmas" from its stores - a charge that Target denies.
Such pressure from conservative groups has had an impact. After complaints from the Catholic League, Wal-Mart agreed to create a "Christmas" page on its Web site rather than a "holiday" page. And Macy's, which is perhaps more closely associated with Christmas than any other retailer, sent activists a letter touting its use of "Merry Christmas" in ads and store windows after it was the target of a small-scale boycott last year.
Corkish, the Baptist pastor, said he walked from one end of Cottonwood Mall to the other last week and saw no specific mention of "Christmas" save for a cart selling greeting cards. Chain stores such as J. Crew prefer to emphasize the commercial side of the holidays with window slogans saying "Get gifted." But even in Utah, where two-thirds of the population are members of a Christ-based faith, there's been no public outcry about shopping malls' secular seasonal decor.
"It really hasn't been an issue," says Rob Kallas, general manager of University Mall in Orem, which has wreaths, garlands and a Santa village but no nativity scene. Unlike at Wal-Mart, which instructs its workers to greet shoppers with the more inclusive "Happy Holidays," University Mall employees are free to say "Merry Christmas," he said.
'Why make a fuss?' Leaders in Utah's non-Christian religious community stressed the importance of respecting all faiths in a state that is becoming more ethnically and culturally diverse.
They also don't want to impede Christians' efforts to celebrate Christmas.
"Why make a big fuss over anything that is positive?" said Nadeem Ahmed, president of the Islamic Society of Greater Salt Lake, who admits to stringing holiday lights on his house. "Muslims believe in Christianity, too."
"If there's a war on anything, there may be a blowback against religious fundamentalism," said Rabbi Joshua Aaronson of the Temple Har Shalom in Park City. "This is not an issue of Buddhists and Jews against Christians. This is an issue of reasonable and moderate people against fundamentalists."
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The Religious News Service contributed to this story.
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Contact Brandon Griggs at griggs@sltrib.com or 801-257-8689. Send comments about this story to livingeditor@sltrib.com.
