Wal-Mart has gotten itself in trouble again.
This time it's over Christmas.
Here's what happened. A customer complained to Wal-Mart that the chain was replacing the phrase "Merry Christmas" with "Happy Holidays."
The customer got this e-mail reply from a customer relations specialist:
"Wal-Mart is a worldwide organization and must remain conscious of this. The majority of the world still has different practices other than 'Christmas,' which is an ancient tradition that has its roots in Siberian shamanism."
I should say at this point that shamanism is another word for witchcraft.
The e-mail went on:
"The colors associated with Christmas — red and white — are actually a representation of the aminita mascera mushroom."
I Googled that name. It's a psychoactive mushroom. Alice went to Wonderland on a bite of one of those.
The Wal-Mart guy continued:
"Santa is also borrowed from the Caucuses, mistletoe from the Celts, Yule log from the Goths, the time (of year) from the Visigoth and the tree from the worship of Baal."
I looked up Baal, too. Baal is still principally thought of as a Canaanite fertility deity.
The Wal-Mart guy wraps up by adding:
"It's a wide, wide world."
Wal-Mart guy was saying Christmas was really a pagan day.
So the Wal-Mart customer service guy was trying to calm down an irate customer by saying her Christian religious holiday was really a pagan day of psychedelic mushrooms and worship of fertility gods.
This is not how you make the 85 percent of the country that self identifies as Christian and the 96 percent which participates or observes Christmas to want to shop in your store.
It didn't help that the PR department backed up the customer service person by saying they were more concerned about the six or seven percent of America that is not Christian than it is about the overwhelming majority that is.
This is the stuff I was writing about in my book "The War on Christmas."
It goes on every year and the Wal-Mart incident is just the opening gun in what promises to be a lively season of Christmas bashing by secularists who mock the holiday as shamanist or pagan or simply something that should be banned.
It won't work. In fact, I predict this will end momentarily with an apology from Wal-Mart and a return of "Merry Christmas" displays.
We'll see.
Check out the book, "The War on Christmas." And write me at waronchristmas@johngibson.com.
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