Interesting piece. I liked it. I think I can provide the symbolic date when the battle was lost. It was November 2015 when Starbucks came out with their new Christmas (okay, Holiday) cups. It was a simple red cup with the Starbucks corporate logo. The Evangelical community -- or at any rate its most vocal members -- was scandalized at the lack of any Christmas symbolism, such as snowflakes or snowmen. Of course, others -- who tended not to be Evangelical -- pointed out at the time that there could be no more purely Christian symbolism than a plain red cup, without the arguably purely secular and commercial "traditional" Christmas symbolism of snowflakes and the like. That so many Evangelicals missed that is pretty solid evidence that Evangelicalism by that time had itself become thoroughly secularized and commercialized.
There was, all the way back in 1999 or 99, a short audio essay on NPR proposing establishing a new holiday for Christ’s birth and leaving December 25th for “the winter holidays.” I found it pretty convincing at the time and still do.
One really key aspect of the (original) Grinch story that I feel is often overlooked is that the Grinch fundamentally does not understand the thing he is angry at. It's not that he feels excluded or just isn't in the mood. He sees a group of people from a distance and assumes the worst about their motives, and his change of heart comes not from some act of kindness towards him, but by confronting the fact that those assumptions weren't true.
Now that I think about it, it's easy to see how this story comes from the same mind as "Green Eggs and Ham". That one is similarly about a guy who hates something without bothering to do the work to learn about and experience it.
Interesting piece. I liked it. I think I can provide the symbolic date when the battle was lost. It was November 2015 when Starbucks came out with their new Christmas (okay, Holiday) cups. It was a simple red cup with the Starbucks corporate logo. The Evangelical community -- or at any rate its most vocal members -- was scandalized at the lack of any Christmas symbolism, such as snowflakes or snowmen. Of course, others -- who tended not to be Evangelical -- pointed out at the time that there could be no more purely Christian symbolism than a plain red cup, without the arguably purely secular and commercial "traditional" Christmas symbolism of snowflakes and the like. That so many Evangelicals missed that is pretty solid evidence that Evangelicalism by that time had itself become thoroughly secularized and commercialized.
There was, all the way back in 1999 or 99, a short audio essay on NPR proposing establishing a new holiday for Christ’s birth and leaving December 25th for “the winter holidays.” I found it pretty convincing at the time and still do.
One really key aspect of the (original) Grinch story that I feel is often overlooked is that the Grinch fundamentally does not understand the thing he is angry at. It's not that he feels excluded or just isn't in the mood. He sees a group of people from a distance and assumes the worst about their motives, and his change of heart comes not from some act of kindness towards him, but by confronting the fact that those assumptions weren't true.
Now that I think about it, it's easy to see how this story comes from the same mind as "Green Eggs and Ham". That one is similarly about a guy who hates something without bothering to do the work to learn about and experience it.