If you're tired of paging through "holiday" catalogs and shopping for "family" trees, you're not alone. On today's Focus on the Family radio broadcast, Dr. James C. Dobson lets retailers know what he thinks of the secularization of Christmas.
"Once again, American corporations have, in significant numbers, decided to avoid any mention of Christmas in their stores, and in their catalogs, and in their merchandise," Dr. Dobson says. "They depend on the Christmas season to generate a high percentage of their profits for the year, and yet they want to do it by distancing themselves from the traditional Christmas story."
A Focus on the Family review of 50 prominent retailers’ Web sites and Christmas catalogs during the first two weeks of November 2007 reveals that about 40 percent of them are suppressing all prominent references to “Christmas” and over half are, at best, providing token acknowledgment of “Christmas” by name.
While the vast majority of retailers carries at least one online item that bears a “Christmas” label, retail Web sites commonly insert “holiday” and other generic euphemisms as a replacement for “Christmas” in catalogs, Web pages, Web links and other Web site internal headlines.
"We want to identify the most prominent of these corporations so that people will know how to shop," Dr. Dobson says.
Repeat offenders from 2006: The Gap and two of its subsidiaries, Old Navy and Banana Republic; Lane Bryant, and Eddie Bauer.
This year's “Christmas Avoidance Award” — for the retailer that went out of its way to replace "Christmas” with “holiday” — goes to Pier 1 Imports.
LISTEN TO THE BROADCAST
To find a station in your area or to listen online, visit our broadcast page.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Here's the list of how retailers are dealing with Christmas.
CitizenLink Managing Editor Stuart Shepard imagines a brand-new holiday in his whimsical Stoplight video commentary.
BUY A CHRISTMAS BUTTON
Let others know that you support Christmas.
