NOTE: As an historical point, the Puritans actually invented the War on Christmas by instituting a ban on the holiday during their short tenure in power in England; they considered Christmas to be immoral (or even diabolical) and "Popish". After being more or less hounded out of England, the Puritans then exported their War On Christmas to the New World in the form of a ban on the holiday, in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, that was eventually lifted in 1681.

According To Billy James Hargis' 1960 "Crusader" article [below], during the dark days of 1960 (soon to lead up to the Cuban Missile Crisis) communism was stealthily advancing via liberal Protestant churches and the machinations of Hallmark Greeting Cards and UNICEF.
These days, the War on Christmas only gets truly rolling now in October or November, sans Hallmark's and UNICEF's shared alleged satanic muscle. Are the forces of evil are running out of oomph ?

If we can trust the veracity of a man who campaigned against sex education in schools and was laid low by a sex scandal that came out when two of the students from Hargis' Christian college married and discovered, their honeymoon night, that both had slept with the apparently omnivorous Billy James Hargis, The War On Christmas used to begin in July.

The slippage seems dramatic, and it might be tempting to blame the dramatic seasonal change in the onset of the War On Christmas to empirical factors such as Global Warming except that the ideological lineage of Billy James Hargis's line of conspiricism, which was so tightly aligned with the conspiricism of the John Birch Society that at one point a news report speculated on a possible merger of the Christian Crusade with the JBS, leads more or less to beliefs held by US Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe (and perhaps John Hagee as well) that Global Warming is actually part of the evil communist plot to create a satanic One world government through the United Nations. Whatever the reason though, the trend seems clear ; within a decade or so, the War On Christmas won't get going in earnest until after Christmas. But such a pointlessly late onset could be interpreted also as a very early jump on the following Christmas, and that might be just the sort of perking up the War On Christmas needs to get back its groove. Time will tell.

Below: December 9, 1960 article from "The Crusader"

Hargis & Hagee : A Pointless Digression On Chubby Scotch-Irish Evangelists "Christian Crusade" founder Billy James Hargis shared much in common with Christians United For Israel founder Pastor John Hagee - considerable physical resemblance and also a similar belief in a vast, sinister Godless atheist/secular-humanist/socialist conspiracy to conquer Christianity and laissez-faire capitalism and subject the peoples of the world to a drab, colorless satanic regime ruled with an iron fist.

There are differences between the two also. At 6'6" Hargis was enormous and fat whereas Hagee is comparatively short and plump. John Hagee is not given to the sort of blustery fits of public, penitent sobbing Hargis was known for, and Hagee also seems unconcerned with the War On Christmas while Billy James Hargis saw it as the vanguard of an evil communist conspiracy that included the National Council Of Churches, Martin Luther King Jr., and Dwight Eisenhower.

A Brief History of The War On Christmas

The "war on Christmas" traces back, historically, to Calvinist bans on the celebration of Christmas which began in Geneva and then migrated, with the spread of Calvinist theological views, to Scotland, where Christmas was almost eradicated, outlawed for four centuries - only to by revived by returning Scotch soldiers who had experienced Christmas rituals while fighting alongside troops of other nationalities who celebrated Christmas. Reportedly, the Scottish soldiers liked the culinary delights which accompanied the holiday. From Scotland, the ban on Christmas spread, briefly (for about a decade) to England with the Cromwellian revolution and then it migrated with the Puritans, fleeing the persecution their political and theological tendency that followed the Cromwellian revolution, to the New World, where, in the Bay State Colony Christmas was at one point legally banned for two decades. Early in the 20th Century in America, the notion of a "war on Christmas", which had long been on the wane, got a boost, as Talk To Action contributor Chip Berlet demonstrates, in 1921 with Henry Ford's notorious and highly influential anti-Jewish tract "The International Jew".

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