....in which I tackle a pressing issue of immediate cultural relevance: The Plain Red Starbucks Cup

I'm already too late to the party, I suppose, to weigh in with anything like a fresh perspective about this year's first installment of the annual War on Christmas conversation, that being the furor and counter-furor over the plain red Starbucks Christmas cup.  The positions, for the most part, have been taken, solidified, and countered thousands of times on social media in the scant few days since Joshua Feuerstein posted his Facebook rant lamenting the absence of Christmas semiotics on his plain red Starbucks Christmas cup.  (By the way, did anyone else catch the irony that Feuerstein is wearing a red ballcap turned around backwards, so that we are missing the symbols that would explicitly identify with his team?)  This morning, my own social media feed was laced with well-meaning but ill-thought-through posts by Christians jumping on the Feuerstein bandwagon, with well-meaning and significantly-more-thought-through posts by Christians pointedly NOT identifying with Feuerstein's rant, and with a few puzzled posts by my liberal friends wondering what the Christians are so worked up about this time.  So the positions are established already.  Well and good.  I don't want to take a position so much anyway as I want to lament the fact that he entire conversation exists.  I'm irritated that, to use the vernacular of my undergraduate students, this is a thing.

For starters, the indignation over the cup is rather ridiculous.  It has been well documented by virtually everybody that none of the images on the old Starbucks Christmas cups was terribly Christian as such.  Many of them are not even terribly Christmas-y, exhibiting, as they do, merely images of winter:  ice skates, snow men, snowflakes, etc.  Several of my friends have pointed out that the red color is really the most Christian thing about the old cups, so that Starbucks has actually retained the essential semiotic of Christmas in the red cup.  This line of reasoning is bolstered by the fact that this year's edition of Starbucks' Christmas Blend -- you'll notice that these leftist Grinches have sloppily left "Christ" in their Christmas Blend -- is the same plain red packaging as the coffee cups. 

As I said above though, the self-righteousness silliness of Christmas zealots and the less-so-but-still-kind-of-self-righteous anxiety of more open-minded Christians to distance themselves from those zealots are both screwing up the opening to my Christmas.  And it's not even Veteran's Day.

See, twenty-some-odd years ago, when I was a kid still, but old enough to drink coffee, Starbucks would have introduced their Christmas cups as plain red cups, and the only thing I or anyone I knew would have thought was, "Huh.  The Christmas cups are plain red this year."  Actually, I doubt we would have even given voice to a thought as vapid as that.  It simply would have been the Christmas cup.  Someone might have noticed that, aesthetically speaking, they preferred the white snowflakes, as my wife did this morning.  (It's an interesting point of fact that the particular cup I think she had in mind hasn't been around since 2007.)  But I don't think anyone would have made anything of the appearance of the cup as an assault on Christmas.  That's because, to a large extent, the culture war over Christmas, with all of its outrage and counter-outrage, didn't exist, at least not to nearly the extent that it does today, and we were all happier for it.

Today, because of the culture of offense and outrage, rather than being happy about the red cup signaling the advent of the Christmas season, I have to think about whether or not the lack of winter symbols on the cup signal some sort of renunciation of the Christmas Holiday.  It's another log on the same fire already stacked with the horribly annoying conversations over whether one ought say, "Merry Christmas" or "Happy Holidays."  When I was a kid, you could say either, and everyone knew you were simply being festive about the Christmas season.  I said "Happy Holidays" sometimes because I heard Bing Crosby sing it on my mom's records, not because I was trying to be especially sensitive to the Jewish kids in town.  (I don't think that there were actually any Jewish kids in the small town I grew up in, but that's beside the point.  It wouldn't have changed anything). 

The "Merry Christmas"/"Happy Holidays" dilemma, while I'm on the subject, is another annoyingly manufactured and completely false occasion for moral outrage.  I'm not offended by either festive greeting.  I am, however, tremendously irritated at anyone being offended by either greeting, because, again, instead of being able to enjoy Christmas in a spirit of joyous festivity, I'm forced to think about our painfully annoying cultural moment.  I think it was actually the politically correct crowd on the left that was responsible for kicking off this one.  There was some idiotic idea that wishing a merry Christmas to someone who wasn't a practicing Christian was somehow forcing your religion on them.  The solution was to generically refer to Christmas as "the Holiday" or "the Season" as if somehow not naming it made it more innocuous.  Actually, I find that the combination of abstraction and adding the definite article actually seems to result in a veritable apotheosis of Christmas as THE HOLIDAY, the holiday above all other holidays.  Thusly, Christmas is, albeit unwittingly, more exalted than ever.  Sure, Hanukkah is right around the corner and Kwanzaa (in all it's manufactured glory) almost overlaps, but Christmas is "the Holiday."  Never thought of it that way, eh? 

Of course, there are those who will maintain that "Happy Holidays" is nice because it is inclusive all of the holidays that surround Christmas, including Thanksgiving, and I'm sure they mean it when they say so, but really, we all know that the etymology of the phrase in common usage refers to Christmas, or at most Christmas and New Year, the veritable season of the 12 Days.  

In any case, the outrage is needless.  Only in America could we be so dumb as to somehow turn a timeless greeting of good will ("Merry Christmas") into something offensive, and then react by the equally stupid decision to take offense at a less-specific-but-equally-festive-and-well-meant greeting ("Happy Holidays") as an assault on Christmas.  When I was teaching in Dubai, my students routinely wished me a Happy Eid before we took the holiday break from university.  I don't recall ever thinking that their greeting was offensive or an attempt to force their Islam on me.  I took it as a genuine wish that I would enjoy the holiday, which was, in fact, Eid, whether I celebrated it with religious observation or not.  Incidentally, the same students wished me a Merry Christmas before we broke at Christmas time.  Muslims wished me Merry Christmas.  I assume that was because they knew I celebrated Christmas and, again, hoped it was happy.  I wished them both Merry Christmas and Happy Eid in turn, for similar reasons.  I wished my Indian students Happy Diwali.  See, in Dubai, they really have a good take on being mulit-cultural, especially as regards holidays.  If there's a holiday, celebrated by a member of the cultural constituency, let's all celebrate it.  That's the idea there.  Nobody is offended.  If it's religious for you, it's religious.  If it's not, it's not.  But nobody has to pretend like a holiday doesn't exist, nor does anyone get worked up by anybody else's observance or lack thereof.  We could learn from that. 
   
So, I guess what I'm saying is that this Christmas, it would be lovely if nobody got offended about anything.  Personally, I like to wait until at least Thanksgiving weekend to celebrate in earnest, but, once that gets here, let's pass around those plain red cups full of Eggnog Latte and wish each other good cheer.  After all, the spirit of Christmas, authorized by the angels themselves, was not socio-political zealotry, but was rather, "peace on earth, good will towards men."