c. 2004 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) Manuel Zamorano is making a list, checking it twice, and Macy’s is definitely coming up as naughty, not nice.
Zamorano, a 56-year-old grandfather from suburban Sacramento, Calif., is so irritated that Macy’s has removed “Merry Christmas” banners from its stores and advertising that he now chairs the “Committee to Save Merry Christmas” to coordinate a boycott against the venerable retailer.
“I don’t have any desire to hurt anybody’s bonuses, anybody’s income, anybody’s Christmas,” said the soft-spoken Zamorano. “But I don’t want these retailers to simply use us and sell to us at Christmas and never actually say `Merry Christmas.”’
While Zamorano’s boycott has yet to pick up any real steam, his campaign reflects a growing resentment among many Christians that creeping secularism now has its sights set on Christmas. It’s part of the annual “December dilemma” for people who say the birth of Jesus Christ is increasingly overshadowed by excessive commercialism.
Frustrated over nativity scenes that are unwelcome in public squares, Salvation Army kettles that have been banned from Target stores and school “holiday” plays that feature Hanukkah songs but no “Away in a Manger,” they’ve had enough. And Macy’s will be the first to pay.
Zamorano said he isn’t asking for much _ “just the words `Merry Christmas.”’ If Macy’s will advertise “after-Christmas sales,” why not “Christmas” sales, he wonders. If Bloomingdale’s will wish customers a “Happy Hanukkah” in the New York Times, where’s the ad for “Merry Christmas?”
“Whose idea was it to remove `Merry Christmas’ from the stores? They certainly didn’t ask me,” said Zamorano, who attends an Assemblies of God church. “Personally, I think it’s political correctness gone amok.”
Since his first letter to Macy’s officials late last year, Zamorano said he’s received about 200 supportive e-mails. Beyond the Web site, http://www.savemerrychristmas.org, there is no central office, no budget, no board of directors.
Zamorano hopes his boycott against Macy’s and its parent company, Federated Department Stores (which also includes Bloomingdale’s), will yield a single-digit percentage decrease in sales, enough to force Federated to take him seriously.
Other retailers may soon find themselves targets of the boycott, he said. So watch out, Wal-Mart: Manuel Zamorano is coming to town. “Once a boycott starts, it takes on a life of its own,” he said. “We’re doing it one (store) at a time.”
For its part, Federated said that would be the ultimate Miracle on 34th Street. Federated spokeswoman Carol Sanger called the boycott “unfortunate.” Last year, the company’s 460 stores raked in $5 billion in fourth-quarter sales and expects the same or better this year.
“I think our sales will be quite fine, thank you,” she said. “People are always boycotting. It’s sort of like get in line and take a number.”
Neither Macy’s nor the National Retail Federation has any formal policy on “Merry Christmas,” and both encourage clerks to be inclusive of all shoppers. “Retailers are not in the business of alienating their customers,” said Ellen Tolley, a spokeswoman for the retailers’ group.
While Zamorano may seem to be a lonely voice crying out in the bleak midwinter, he is not alone. Robert Knight, director of the Culture and Family Institute at the conservative Concerned Women for America, said Macy’s is symptomatic of a larger coordinated campaign to “single out Christmas for destruction.”
“`Happy Holidays’ is starting to grate in many a Christian’s ear as not so much a friendly greeting but as a way to avoid saying `Merry Christmas,” said Knight, who has joined the Macy’s boycott.
Even some Jews _ although not many _ say generic phrases like “Season’s Greetings” dilute the richness of America’s diversity. David Elcott, the U.S. director of interfaith affairs for the American Jewish Committee, said “Happy Holidays” may be too neutral.
“`Happy Holidays’ doesn’t excite me,” Elcott said. “But I recognize and respect the sensitivities with which people say it.”
Not everyone, however, is buying it. Bill Donohue, president of the New York-based Catholic League, has battled “cultural fascists” for years to erect public nativity scenes. But targeting Macy’s seems futile, he said.
“That wouldn’t be my tactic, going after Macy’s,” he said. “Quite frankly, on a scale of one to 10, that’s hardly going to be on my list of priorities.”
While slogans like “Jesus is the Reason for the Season” and “Put Christ Back in Christmas” are nothing new, scholars caution against seeing Christmas in America as a purely religious affair. In fact, often times it has been anything but. In the mid-1800s, Christmas more closely resembled Mardi Gras, with roving bands of drunken revelers.
“I don’t know if it ever had an extremely strong religious component in America,” said Karal Ann Marling, a University of Minnesota art historian whose book, “Merry Christmas!” chronicled the evolution of Christmas. It has always been “more secular than sacred,” she said.
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In early America, religious celebrations of Christmas were shunned by many Puritan-minded Protestants, and Dec. 25 was a relatively quiet feast day for liturgical Catholics and Anglicans. It wasn’t until about 1850 that trees and gifts entered the scene, and merchants really caught on by the 1880s, around the time Macy’s unveiled its landmark storefront windows brimming with holiday goods.
Leigh Schmidt, a professor of religion at Princeton University, said there have always been “mixed motives” for celebrating Christmas, from families who celebrate its sacred roots to retailers mindful of their bottom line.
“They’re all overlapping,” he said. “The churches get more into it, the family customs become more involved, the stores start to get into it. It all goes together, it all overlaps.”
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Bah humbug, says Zamorano, who insists he will not budge.
“There is still time,” he told Federated CEO Terry Lundgren in a recent letter, “to resolve our differences and make this a Merry Christmas for everyone.”
AMB/JL END ECKSTROM
