If it’s a war, Christmas won

NO MATTER how hard I try, I can’t understand the hullabaloo over Christmas this year. Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, Bill O’Reilly and the Wall Street Journal’s editorial writers are apoplectic over some perceived secular conspiracy to turn Christmas into a politically correct, generic, unholy holiday.

Clearly, these guys have never been to the Grove.

I was there just the other day, and I can assure you that Christmas at L.A.’s hottest outdoor mall is alive and well. In fact, there in the heart of the heavily Jewish Fairfax district -- so Jewish that the Grove features a kiosk serving kosher sausages and hot dogs -- there is hardly a nod to any holiday except Christmas.

Were the right-wingers grousing about the crass commercialization of Christ’s birthday, I’d be singing from the same hymnal. But their insistence that there’s an unrelenting campaign to eliminate all signs and symbols of the faith rings completely false -- especially at a place such as the Grove.

There’s the mall’s 100-foot Christmas tree -- “taller than the tree at Rockefeller Center” and “among the largest public Christmas displays in the country,” boasts a sign beneath the towering white fir. For good measure, the tree is decorated with 15,000 sparkling lights and 10,000 ornaments.

In the middle of the Grove rises Santa’s house, a candy-covered palace that seems, at a glance, to be as big as many a Hancock Park mansion (and where, for $12 to $60, children can have their picture taken with the jolly man in red). And above it all, Santa and his reindeer hover near the Grove’s neon sign.

From the moment you get out of your car in the parking lot, until the time you leave, Christmas music is wafting through the air. And it’s not just festive songs such as “Jingle Bells” (originally a Thanksgiving tune) that fill your ears. When I was there, “The First Noel” was playing:

This star drew night to the northwest,

O’er Bethlehem it took its rest;

And there it did both stop and stay,

Right over the place where Jesus lay.

Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel,

Born is the King of Israel.

Christmas carolers stroll the Grove, serenading shoppers. Vendors hawk roasted chestnuts and eggnog (though no Hanukkah latkes or banana custard with raisins for Kwanzaa). And the Top Hats, a Rockettes-style chorus line of high-heeled women in red-and-white miniskirts, entertain along the Grove’s trolley line.

In short, there is nothing inclusive or the least bit politically correct at the Grove, which has boasted of drawing more visitors than Disneyland.

Not that I’m complaining. Christmas is a beautiful holiday (all the kitsch at the Grove notwithstanding). And with Christians making up more than three-quarters of the U.S. population, I expect to be inundated with Christmas for at least six weeks each year: on TV, on the radio and while I’m out shopping.

But it gets irritating when members of the far right whine about a conspiracy to “push the Christian faith aside and generic-ize it,” as the Wall Street Journal recently put it, quoting Bishop Eddie Long. The Journal’s editorial went on to opine against “the systematic neutralization of a religious holiday” while wondering “how low ... can the secularizers sink?”

Give me a break. “Happy Holiday” cards from a White House that wants to appear broad-minded and wishes of “Happy Holidays” from retailers that want to extend the shopping season and expand their profits hardly amount to the systematic neutralization of anything. Christmas has always been ubiquitous in America, and even in our PC age it continues to be so.

For all the hollering about the “war on Christmas,” this is a totally one-sided battle. And as part of the American minority that isn’t Christian, I can’t help but wonder, “For God’s sake, what are those guys griping about?”