The Gap’s “Holiday” ad this year is beginning to attract some attention, because the lyrics sung over the ad’s frenetic dancers state, at one point, “Go Christmas! Go Hanukkah! Go Kwanzaa! Go Solstice!”

The mention of the winter solstice is unusual for a mainstream retailer, but the ad’s desire to evoke a “holiday” comprised of several different festivals rather than evoking Christmas is depressingly familiar. The ad shows, once again, that the cultural imperative of downgrading Christmas has replaced the commercial imperative of selling.

Of course, it did not used to be this way. Retailers used to try to tap into the enormous good will generated by Christmas by airing ads that evoked Christmas, and no other holiday. One I remember from my youth was the Norelco ad that showed Santa riding an electric shaver–that ad was popular among kids far too young to buy the product being advertised.

There were even ads that were little more than visual Christmas cards, such as this Miller ad from 1977.

What caused this change is not a decline in the number of Americans who celebrate Christmas, which a poll from 2005 indicated was 96% of the population. What caused this change is the War Against Christmas, a War whose existence is denied by most of those waging it but that nonetheless is making retailers pay homage to “holidays”, such as the winter solstice, celebrated by virtually no one.

A sure indication that we are making progress in the War against Christmas is Max Blumenthal’s attack on VDARE.com’s role in first drawing attention to the issue. [See the slightly altered version at The Daily Beast, and the original, preserved and annotated, on VDARE.com. ] Blumenthal even attacks me, claiming that “Brimelow’s writers [including me] dared to name the true anti-Christian Grinch: Jews.” Unfortunately for Blumenthal, his one small paragraph referring to me is filled with errors. The piece of mine he cites repeatedly refers to “multiculturalists,” not Jews, as waging War against Christmas. He claims I was “[t]he winner of Brimelow’s 2001 War on Christmas competition,” which was actually won by Fred Fries. Blumenthal states I termed Hanukkah a “faux-holiday,” while I actually wrote that “Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, and all the rest are presented as faux-Christmases.” (Blumenthal has apparently now corrected this error, without ever acknowledging that he made it or that I referred to other holidays besides Hanukkah as “faux-Christmases”).[VDARE.com Note: Mr. Blumenthal still hasn't corrected the two misspelled names, Ramesh Ponnuru's and Burt Prelutsky's, in spite of the fact that we helpfully pointed them out last night. Helpful hint to Mr. Blumenthal--if you're not a naturally good speller, do what columnists all over the country are doing with Governor Blagojevich's name--use the copy and paste function.]

Blumenthal asserts that I called Hanukkah the “Jewish Kwanzaa,” neglecting to mention that I was quoting Frederic Schwarz, who described Hanukkah as the “Jewish Kwanzaa” in an article in the December 2000 issue of American Heritage magazine in which he also discussed Hanukkah’s theological insignificance and wrote that its current incarnation is “an invented cultural celebration.” Blumenthal claims that I “insisted that those behind the assault on Christmas ‘evidently prefer’ Hanukkah.” What I actually wrote was that “The malice of the multiculturalists is revealed in the way they present the alternative holidays they so evidently prefer,” with those “alternative holidays” being “Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, and all the rest” of the holidays mentioned earlier in the article—“Bodhi Day, Diwali, Ramadan, the winter solstice.” So much for Blumenthal’s reading skills.

Blumenthal also ignores the fact that I have expressly written that those waging War against Christmas are composed of all faiths and of none. In the piece I wrote for the American Conservative during Christmas 2003, I wrote, “The transformation of Christmas to ‘holiday’ and the attendant impoverishment of our culture was brought about to accommodate not the small minority of Americans who do not celebrate Christmas but the far smaller minority—comprising those of all faiths and of none—who resent the overwhelming majority who do celebrate Christmas. In my experience, most non-Christians do not resent Christmas and generally enjoy some aspects of its celebration.”

Despite Blumenthal’s feigned outrage, it is clear that the public elevation of holidays in temporal proximity to Christmas is intended to downgrade the celebration of Christmas. Indeed, the London Daily Mail reported on November 1, 2007 that a leading Labour think tank was advocating that Christmas be “downgraded” as part of an “urgent and upfront campaign” to promote a “multicultural understanding of Britishness.” [Christmas should be 'downgraded' to help race relations says Labour think tank, By James Chapman] The way this was to be accomplished was by promoting other holidays at the expense of Christmas, as I noted in my 2007 War against Christmas piece for VDARE.com.

Over at NRO, an entertaining spat has developed between Ramesh Ponnuru and David Frum over Ponnuru’s criticism of Frum’s book Comeback. Ponnuru writes that “none of [Frum's] facts can be trusted without independent verification” and that Frum’s pose as a “bold truth-teller” is “insufferable.” Frum, for his part, describes Ponnuru’s “distinctive Grand Panjandrum manner” as “absurdly pompous” and refers to Ponnuru’s “weird combination of vitriol and grandiosity.” Of course, there is a lot of truth to each man’s description of the other.

The irony is that, as Ponnuru writes, both “agree on the need for Republicans to offer an agenda that helps the lower middle class.” As Ponnuru writes, he has even been writing about the need to curb immigration to help the lower middle class for six years![VDARE.COM note: He's referring to Minding the 'Golden Door': Toward a Restrictionism that can Succeed, an attack on Peter Brimelow, April 2, 2001—see more about Ponnuru here.]

The deeper irony–one that will be lost on both Ponnuru and Frum–is that the man each of them has vilified, Pat Buchanan, has been forcefully arguing for “Republicans to offer an agenda that helps the lower middle class” and to curb immigration since his first run for President, in 1992. In this, Buchanan was on the same page as Chronicles, which was the first major publication to recognize the need for immigration reform after the disastrous Immigration Act of 1965.

It is nice to see that Frum and Ponnuru are beginning to recognize that Buchanan and Chronicles may have had a point all these years. Just don’t expect either of them to offer a word of gratitude, given the all too accurate description each offers of the other.