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This Season, Greetings Are at Issue
RALEIGH, N.C. — This year, as Christmas season swung into gear, Pastor Patrick Wooden's followers fanned out to shopping malls across Raleigh to deliver a muscular message of holiday cheer: As Christian shoppers, they would like to be greeted with the phrase "Merry Christmas" — not a bland "Happy Holidays" — and stores that failed to do so would risk losing their business....

...In Oklahoma and Miami, local skirmishes have erupted over the display of nativity scenes on government property. A California man has called for a boycott of Macy's and Bloomingdale's department stores, demanding the phrase "Merry Christmas" be used. In Denver, the mayor's attempt to remove "Merry Christmas" from a light display raised such a howl of protest that he reversed his decision....

...Conservative Americans feel ready to push back against "the secularists or the humanists or the elitists" who dominate popular culture, said the Rev. Mark Creech of the Christian Action League of North Carolina, which is based in Raleigh.

"It's a cultural war. We are in the thick of it," Creech said. "It's not so much an attack on us. It's an attack on Christ."

Throughout history, religious people have fretted over the holiday's secular aspects, said Penne Restad, a lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of "Christmas in America: A History."

Created by the Roman Catholic Church in the 4th century, the celebration of the nativity coincided with pre-Christian feasts, allowing observant Christians to "then go out the door and participate in Saturnalia," Restad said.

In pre-Colonial days, English authorities looked on the holiday as a riot of drunkenness and hooliganism. American Puritans rejected it completely, preferring to get up and go to work. Not until the 1820s and '30s, with the holiday "getting rowdier and rowdier and more destructive," did Americans redefine it as a safe and private family time, Restad said — the "old-fashioned Christmas" celebrated in carols and Currier & Ives prints.

Karal Ann Marling, author of "Merry Christmas! Celebrating America's Greatest Holiday," called complaints about secularization "complete and utter bunk."

"If you think Christmas meant the baby Jesus in the past, it didn't," said Marling, a professor of art history at the University of Minnesota....

...On the day after Thanksgiving, the church ran a full-page advertisement in the Raleigh News and Observer, urging Christians to "spend their hard-earned dollars with merchants who include the greeting Merry Christmas."...

...Wooden, 43, considers the campaign such a success that he has already set aside money in the church budget — full-page ads cost about $7,600 — to buy a similar advertisement next year. Fresh off the fierce debate over same-sex marriage, which he opposes, he says condemnation from the left does not trouble him. On the contrary, he said: "It seems to me the greater the persecution, the stronger the church."

As far as complaints from people of other religions go, Wooden looks at it this way: An ice-cream vendor doesn't have to like every flavor he sells.

"There's one group of people who get bullied all the time, and that's Christians," he said. "I know what it is like to be bullied. It is apartheid in reverse — the majority is being bullied by the minority."...