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It helps when the attackers clarify that they are, in fact, targeting Christians with their statements. For example, see this excerpt from the Canadian Human Rights Commission:
(Any non religious attacks on Christmas are so utterly banal that they've slipped my mind. Something something commercialization? Something something bad family dynamics? Snow is cold?)
When's the last time that you saw a Christmas movie that included mass? How about the last time you've seen a government agency or an official (not a politician) celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour? Heck, I can't remember the last time I've heard a "Bethlehem and Jesus" style song on the radio instead of a "Presents and Reindeer" one.
The religious connotations haven't been entirely removed, but it's not far off.
Really? Joy to the World, Mary did you Know, Oh Come all ye Faithful, etc. are all pretty commonly played on the radio in late December where I am. What they don't play is actual religious hymns, but did you really expect them to?
I'll start counting from now on, and (if I remember) I'll post the results in a month. Currently, I'm at 3 secular, 0 religious Christmas songs.
EDIT: 24-0
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A point that rankles my American other half, year after year, is that the "Christmas Music" played publicly here in Ireland is a completely different canon to what she grew up with back home. And, unusually, there is just a total failure of Americanisation in the domain of Christmas music - her canon seems ancient (many tunes from the 1950s versus a tilt towards the 1980s here, because of different population pyramids - we don't have a bulge of 60-70 year olds monopolising all the cultural memory space) and painfully schmaltzy to most Irish ears, including my own.
For example, the universally-acknowledged GOAT of Christmas music in Ireland is The Pogues' Fairytale of New York, a thoroughly secular 1980s ballad that consistently rankles schoolmarmish woke types not because of overt Christofascism, but because the word "faggot", in the pejorative sense, is a key lyric. This song gives rise to the only occassion in modern Ireland where a person can drunkenly chant the word "faggot" at a stuffy office (Christmas) party and recieve no censure.
Overtly religious stuff is also played publicly (a fine example is Mary's Boy Child by Boney M, a jaunty German-calypso tune) because it's a religious holiday. The modal Irish person under 35 sounds like a Q-Anon believer when discussing Catholicism (it's a giant conspiracy run by paedos to amass wealth & get a go of children), yet will still tolerate religious music at Christmas because, come on. I don't know how American culture has managed to get away from this. Maybe it really is semitic sour grapes from the pullers of American cultural levers.
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In stores and malls, I haven't heard any religious Christmas music since sometime in the 1990s. It's just one billion repetitions of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas", "Chestnuts Rosting on an Open Fire", and various pop abominations.
My two local malls (Tysons Corner Center and Tysons Galleria) and the stores in them, in fact, have really been skimping on Christmas decorations in the past few years. In the 1980s, the whole place used to get transformed: tinsel and colored lights everywhere, decorated trees in every shop window. Seeing this used to be one of the things I most looked forward to about the Christmas season.
Nowadays, there are just a few anemic strings of white lights hanging from the ceiling (colored lights seem to be permanently out of fashion for some reason) and almost no stores have any decorations put up at all!
I suspect it has something to do with the fact that the area now has a sizable Muslim population (when I go there now, maybe a quarter to a third of the women are wearing headscarves or hijab) who'd rather not see a Christian holiday celebrated, although I doubt anyone would admit publically that that's the reason.
I think this is part of a wider aesthetic shift towards being sleek/minimalistic that has been happening for a long time. I distinctly remember noticing as a kid in the early 2000s that there was a trend with upper-class people more likely to do white lights and lower-class being more likely to do colored lights. I tried to get my folks to put up colored lights instead of white lights, but the compromise ended up being all one color (I chose blue, which led to people asking if we had converted to Judaism).
Colours can be tasteful if they're used with care but generally less is more. Our neighbours use multicoloured lights but it's offset by each bulb being very small. The bigger the display the more the colours will clash. Red and white could be a suitable combination for the season but monochrome white makes an effective Schelling point for a whole neighbourhood to converge on and create a semi-coordinated appearance.
For me blue lights don't say Christmas (or Judaism), they say either "blue LEDs hit the market and everyone began using them in order to look more futuristic... twenty years ago" or "emergency vehicle". The one positive is that it's not as eerie and unearthly as green. Blue is cold and eye-catching and that's why it's such a confusing choice to have a big bright one on the front of so many TVs, but again: "futuristic". Christmas lights should be warm and festive, like a log fire reflected on a brass coal scuttle or candlelight shining through stained-glass. White lights are bland but at least they're reminiscent of frost and snow and fit a wintertime palette.
I've noticed a lot of people don't distinguish between warm and cold white though and end up using the bluish white lights indoors where a warmer tone would be much cosier and more inviting, leaving their sitting room with a similar lighting ambience to a commercial kitchen.
I guess that now LED ropes are getting cheaper soon everything will look like Tron. "Bloop bloop bloop! Merry twelve slash twenty five."
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I've definitely heard "Silent Night" recently. And the vastly overplayed Trans-Siberian Orchestra compilation includes religious songs.
Skimping on Christmas decorations is probably a result of the general decline of in-store shopping.
YMMV - malls in my area are absolutely packed right now. There seems to be a kind of resurgence going on now that the recession is cancelled.
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I think acknowledging the Christian roots of these holidays and wanting acknowledgements of other religious holidays is distinct from being an attack on Christianity. The obvious reason why holidays like Good Friday and Christmas are holidays acknowledged by the federal government is religious, specifically Christian, influence. This is distinct from other non-religious holidays (like Canada Day or Thanksgiving). The question is whether the elevation of those specific holidays comport with our present values. What's the justification for having a federal holiday for Christian holidays but not Jewish ones? Or Muslim ones? Or any other religion? Having your nation's federal government have specific holidays that correspond to Christian holidays, but no other religion's, certainly feels like religious bigotry to me!
Oppressing the majority and being intolerant to their culture and religion for the sake of accommodating minorities is not a good idea if one wants to combat religious bigotry. It actually what you do if you want to enforce it, and that is why conquering religions did just that on majorities they conquered.
What you suggest is not the end of bigotry but the elevation of it by an oppression of the majority by an alliance of minorities. AKA progressive stack religious edition the anti-Christian version.
In the case of an atheist allying with religious minorities against the majority then you still got bigotry of the atheist and the religious minorities. Not only are atheists not exempt from bigotry, but in the modern world have been some of the worst participants in it, with Christians being often the victims.
And if someone has the goal of an atheistic state oppressing all religions, you got an oppression there too. Both that and nor not allowing the majority the right to celebrate their religion are a case of a worse value system and not a better one.
Moreover, like non Christians have their own countries and there is no agitation of this nature, so do Christians have theirs. In fact there is no agitation of this extend about avoiding actual mistreatment of Christians neither in Israel nor in Muslims countries the two examples you mentioned. There is some by the Christian community in Israel but not much attention by those eager to complain about religious bigotry. Albeit, the worst state about mistreating Christians is one of the Muslim ones and not the Jewish one. Maybe Pakistan.
I guess a final point to be made is that experience with the progressive movement and identitarians who align with it tells us that even one-sided multi-culturalism has not been the end point. In fact we see some double standards even now and it is rather plausible that once Christian religion has been even further delegitimized, this will be enforced savagely with the tactic of associating Christianity with evil oppression and hatred, while there will be more tolerance towards other religions like the Jewish and Muslim ones you mentioned. This fits with the general pattern of an alliance of minorities against the majority. So if Christians want to avoid bigotry, the last thing they ought to do is listen to the Anti-Christians.
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It seems to me there is a trade off between inclusivity and tolerance. Tolerance permits the majority to arrange society as they like while permitting effectively opt out whereas inclusivity encourages society to either be neutral or even adopt according to the minority.
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Good observation. Lately I've been feeling like Christmastime begins and ends on the 24th, when I go to church for once in a year. And I'm not even religious. The Advent season, which in my childhood spanned late November to early January, used to be festive and distinctly Christian - but over the last thirty years, the Christian connotations indeed seem to have been lost, and it cheapened the whole affair to the point where it really is all about chocolate and presents and seemingly random themes like reindeer and jolly santa clauses.
Something's been lost. I guess I could still get the original Advent feeling if I actively sought it out, but it's no longer "in the air", as they say.
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