I am sure that by this point everyone has had their fill of the ‘Starbucks Red Cup Controversy.’ In fact, I have not met anyone actually angry about the red cup, only people who are angry that others are upset about it.
This whole ordeal has me thinking though, who is really to say anymore what Christmas is? Hopefully we as a a culture are at a point where Christmas can mean whatever we individually want it to mean.
Don’t believe me? Well let us take a look through history. In Christianity’s early years, Easter was the main holiday to be celebrated. Until the fourth century, Jesus’ birth was not celebrated. After all, his actual date of birth is never clearly stated in the Bible.
Common belief is that the Pope chose Dec. 25th as the day to celebrate so that it would both coincide with and adopt the traditions of the Pagan Saturnalia festival, which was already popular in Rome. Why? Probably in an effort to make it easier to convert people to Christianity, although he also made the holiday easier to celebrate for all of the above.
Overall, I think Starbucks has the right idea with their plain red cup. The intentional exclusion of specific Christmas wording and iconography serves to make their product, in fact, more inclusive. When all is said and done, Christmas’s core principles of peace, love, happiness and togetherness are not strictly Christian.
The real question is: does religion really have to play a role in whether or not someone can celebrate Christmas? I was not raised in a religious household, and in fact I didn’t even know who Jesus was until elementary school. However, without fail, every year my family has come together to celebrate Christmas.
Of course, our celebration might differ from others’. We don’t go to church on Christmas morning, but my relatives do fix some heavenly Chinese food. Despite our differences, we uphold the same Christmas ideals of family, happiness and peace. This all harkens back to my point that there is no singular meaning of Christmas. To me, Christmas means a nice brunch and afterwards being able to visit with family members I don’t get to see every day. I’ve never celebrated Christmas in a particularly Christian way, yet I still do celebrate it because the season can be interpreted to mean different things to different people.