American Christmas traditions have also contributed to the sense of community and neighborliness that has made this blessed country the great exception in all of Christian history. In every other nation where different denominations have co-existed or arisen, the disparate followers of Christ expressed their doctrinal disagreements by slaughtering, burning, dismembering and damning one another with unimaginable ferocity.  Even in the supposedly civilized Mother Country in the 1600’s, Puritan “Roundheads” battled Church of England “Cavaliers” in the grotesquely bloody English Civil War, with hundreds of thousands of casualties. At the same time, their counterparts in Massachusetts and Virginia might disagree over Scriptural interpretation (or even in approaches to the Christmas holiday) but never came to blows or bloodshed, and even managed to work together to forge a new nation in the next century.

  It should come as no surprise that the prospect of “chestnuts roasting on an open fire” appeals to lost sheep more readily than the image of “damned souls roasting on eternal hell fire.”  

  This seasonal recognition doesn’t mean that preachers and teachers should forever forgo all religious messages more demanding than “peace on earth to men of good will” --- but there are better occasions for those evangelical approaches than office Christmas parties (and “a time to every purpose under heaven.”) For many Americans, Christmas serves as a point of entry (or re-entry) to Godly connection – as it does to Soapy the Bum, who feels his whole soul transformed on hearing a Christmas hymn streaming out of an open church door in O. Henry’s great short story, “The Cop and the Anthem.”

  Secularist militants dislike the holiday because its religious trappings remain inescapable and it reminds them of the nation’s deep Christian roots. Some faith-based enthusiasts may simultaneously resent the ecumenical, commercialized, gauzy, feel-good atmosphere associated with the festival in its American incarnation. But most citizens—including those of us who constitute the nation’s small non-Christian minority – continue to value the properly revered “Christmas spirit” with its emphasis on eternal verities like kindness, community, continuity and new life that continue to characterize what the song rightly heralds as “the most wonderful time of the year.”