Christian Christmas is Christian, but it is very different from Secular Christmas, which is practiced by Americans of all faiths as well as atheists and agnostics.
Beyond that different denominations celebrate very different Christmases. Compare midnight Mass of the nativity at a local catholic parish to the service at a local evangelical church to a mainline protestant church and they're very different.
What is depicted on film is clearly secular Christmas.
> didn’t Xmas start being used exactly for that reason, i.e. to separate the event from religion.
No, its a Christian abvreviation originating from the ancient use of the greek Chi (visually identical to Latin X), sometimes along with Rho (Latin P) — the first two letters of Christ in Greek — as an abbreviation for Christ. Itsl dates back to, IIRC, the 16th C with similar forms back to the medieval period.
Its been railed about as originating in a modern attempt to de-Christianize (or even explicitly paganize) Christmas more recently, but that is completely ahistorical.
Whatever its origins, I have the distinct impression that, in addition to being a shorthand, it is used commonly to disambiguate Secular Christmas from Christian Christmas. I agree that Fox News blows this out of proportion and isn't correct on minutia about its origins, but that doesn't mean it isn't commonly used to distinguish between secular and religious variants which is IMHO the more substantial point.
> ... didn’t Xmas start being used exactly for that reason, i.e. to separate the event from religion.
No lol, that's just what Fox news said when they were talking about the "War on Christmas". It's a historical typographical thing where X was used as an abbreviation for Christ, you can look it up. Nothing about trying to separate it from religion.
The modern American form is a consumerist orgy owing more to Macy’s, Coca-Cola, and greeting card industry than Christianity, that has less in common with the Christian holiday some of whose elements it adapted than the Christian holiday has to do with Saturnalia.
There are Christian (and particularly protestant) cultural influences and vestiges all around us, in many of our attitudes towards things.
The idea that the modern American lifestyle is completely divorced from Christianity is only possible because of the way in which our culture has become naturalized to you.
> There are Christian (and particularly protestant) cultural influences and vestiges all around us, in many of our attitudes towards things.
Sure, that doesn't contradict anything I said, which was restricted to a particular response about the modern American commercial festival of “Christmas".
> The idea that the modern American lifestyle is completely divorced from Christianity
...is not one I’ve expressed, so if you want to argue against it, go respond to someone actually making that argument.
