Fifth Avenue Represses Christmas

Dan Henninger writes this morning:

This is the year Christmas died as a public event in the United States.

In his column today, Henninger describes Fifth Avenue, home to most of New York’s great department stores, a place where each has always striven to outdo the other in creating the most festive Christmas window decorations.

No more.

Forget public Nativity scenes, as court fiat commanded us to do years ago. On Fifth Avenue this year you can’t even find dear old Santa Claus. Or his elves. Christmas past has become Christmas gone.

What do you find in the windows of, say, Saks Fifth Avenue?

The scenes inside Saks Fifth Avenue’s many windows aren’t easy to describe. Saks calls it “The Winter Palace.” I would call it Prelude to an Orgy done in vampire white and amphetamine blue.

A luxuriating woman lies on a table, her legs in the air. Saks’ executives, who bear responsibility for this travesty, did have the good taste to confine to a side street the display of a passed-out man on his back (at least he’s wearing a tux), spilling his martini, beneath a moose head dripping with pearls. Adeste Gomorrah.

Bergdorf Goodman:

In place of anything Christmas, Bergdorf offers “The Frosty Taj Mahal,” a palm-reading fortune teller—and King Neptune, the pagan Roman god, seated with his concubine. 

One is fascinated to see that brigades of atheist lawyers have brought back pagan idolatry and polytheism.

They might think that they are against all religions, but they are only against the religions that have founded Western Civilization.