War on logic
It seems to start earlier every year, doesn’t it? I mean, we haven’t even celebrated Thanksgiving yet, and the War-on-Christmas rhetorical drumbeat has already started.
I sometimes wonder whether the whole War-on-Christmas thing is a game to see who can advance the most ludicrous argument with a straight face. If I’m right, then I think the 2008 holiday season may already have a winner. In the Nov. 20 installment of his aptly named “Wonder Land” column, Wall Street Journal editor Daniel Henninger boldly goes where no Culture Warrior has gone before.
This year we celebrate the desacralized “holidays” amid what is for many unprecedented economic ruin — fortunes halved, jobs lost, homes foreclosed. People wonder, What happened? One man’s theory: A nation whose people can’t say “Merry Christmas” is a nation capable of ruining its own economy.
Think the economic crisis is the result of a complicated chain of causes and effects? Nonsense. As we all know, saying “Happy Holidays” at this time of year is more than just a misguided effort to acknowledge the existence of (a) multiple Christian holidays and (b) multiple non-Christian holidays that occur over the course of several days. It is also an assault on religion itself, or at least on the only religion that matters. And without (Christian) religion you have no morality, and without morality you have unchecked greed. So, as Henninger’s editorial argues, failing to say “Merry Christmas” with abandon as you go about your business in the secular world can only result in total economic collapse. I hope you’ll keep this in mind as you try to stretch your budget to allow some holiday cheer this year: all of this could have been avoided, if only “Northerners and atheists” — and you know who you are — hadn’t permitted this country to slide into “Christmas”-less amorality.
Read for yourself, but I think we have a winner. Please: no others need apply.
Hello Mollie (and All),
Thank you for this. I agree with you, this may indeed be a winning entry.
But I did think I should add that one can read Mr. Henninger’s statement slightly more charitably. Rather than asserting that there is a causal connection between our inability to say “Merry Christmas” and the economic crisis, Mr. Henninger might be claiming that our inability to say “Merry Christmas” and the economic crisis might have the same root causes. This is at least possible given another claim made later in the full article you linked us to: “It has been my view that the steady secularizing and insistent effort at dereligioning America has been dangerous.” If we assume that “the steady secularizing and insistent effort at dereligioning America” to which Mr. Henninger refers actually exists, he might be claiming that this is the cause of both our inability to say “Merry Christmas” and the economic crisis.
Mind you, Mr. Henninger gives no evidence that the steady secularizing and insistent effort at dereligioning America exists other than the rise in practice of Americans wishing each other “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas”.
And Mr. Henninger gives no clear argument that would establish that if the steady secularizing and insistent effort at dereligioning America exists, then it would tend to create conditions that would result in a financial crisis.
So I think that even on this more charitable reading Mr. Henninger’s argument has about as much merit as the arguments I have seen in print that encouraging girls to participate in team sports leads to an increase in the percentage of grown women who identify themselves as gay. (No I am not joking, though I can’t give citations because I got rid of the literature where I read this.) Which is to say, not much, beyond being a winning entry in the War-on-Christmas game.
Desacralized holidays and the economic crisis? That’s funny – I thought it, at least in part, due to too much worship of the God of the markeplace and excessive attention paid to the patron saint of untrammeled greed.
This makes the point of how vacuous the cultural wars are and how sloganeering apparently will make up for the lack of discipleship in our lives. Eric Berne the psychiatrist who wrote “Games People Play” named it the game of “Ain’t it awful.” Wouldn’t it be nice if all were like us.
Well made point, Mollie. Real disciples will consider Matthew 25:31.
Given the way Christmas is celebrated in American culture, I think I would actually prefer if we stopped referring to this high holy day of excess and materialism as “Christmas”. Let the stores and marketers celebrate and promote this joyous season of (generic) “holiday” to their heart’s content. Perhaps when we have sufficiently divorced this economic holiday from the name “Christamas” we Christians can start to reclaim and renew the feast of our savior’s birth.
For suggestions on how to do this in your own family I highly recommend the Christmas guide (“Whose Birthday is it Anyway?”) that is available from simpleliving dot org.
I think there is something to David Tenney’s suggestion. It’s time we begin “the steady s[acral]izing and insistent effort at [re-]religioning America.” Holiday and Christmas, with secular greetings for the former and religious greetings for the latter. I like it.
Now really, isn’t it about time we started deVaticaning the Church, and deAmericaning the world as well as deChristmasing all those suburban malls.
So add your own list of de____inging; this could really start a trend. eh!
Two or three posters above made passing comments that are critical of the “holiday season” consumerism and materialism that is coming upon all of us. (This critical stance, by the way, strikes me as something that most if not all posters on this blog can find agreement on.) While there must have many reasons for the materialism as we know it, a major one has to do with the FDR’s economic policies. The story is complicated, but also well told in _The End to Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War_ by Alan Brinkley (historian, current provost at Columbia, and son of broadcaster David). It’s too long to go into here, but one result of those policies was the state’s full embrace of consumerism and large corporations that were essential to postwar economic growth.
Sorry if I sound like hijacking the thread’s original focus that has to do with culture war… But culture war is a newer phenomenon while consumerism has a longer history. Brinkley’s book does not address consumerism in moral terms, but it is hard to divorce the moral components of consumerism to economic policies shaped by American liberalism during the Great Depression and WWII. At any rate, it is worth reading.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Yes, Peter, you’re right, and very fair-minded too. I think I’m not so inclined to be fair because, as you observe, the whole editorial is begging the question by assuming we already accept the claims of the War-on-Christmas complaint tradition.
David Tenney, I’ve thought something along those lines myself. Shouldn’t we be pleased to see a distinction made between the commercial excesses of the “holiday season” and the religious solemnity of Christmas? I know I find it convenient that the secular celebration of Christmas ends just as the religious celebration is beginning. It’s much less distracting that way.
“I find it convenient that the secular celebration of Christmas ends just as the religious celebration is beginning.”
True, but we pretty much lose Advent. (Imagine trying to properly observe lent in the midst of a nearly inescapable, month and a half long cultural celebration of chocolate, eggs, and bunnies.)
Somehow though I’m imagining that protesting against “the war against Advent” won’t catch on in quite the way that this “war against Christmas” business has.
I do, however, invite everyone to celebrate International Buy Nothing Day this Friday. (Google it or look it up on wikipedia for more info. It’s just a little bit of light-hearted cultural resistance to all the “Black Friday” hysteria.)
Come on folks, lighten up a little. Enjoy your thanksgiving celebration. Isn’t it something that all Americans, people of faith, all faiths, and people of no faith can celebrate together. There is no cultural war over Thanksgiving. There doesn’t need to be over Christmas either.
Christians enjoy the “consumerist” side as much as the religious. Those who wish can practice its religious meaning. It too is a celebration of thanksgiving.
So lets just stop the crap, go shopping tomorrow, if your nuts enough and stuff yourself silly… and no desillying either.
And that’s the final word from Canukastan as Pat Buchannan once famously said.
No cultural war in the US over Thanksgiving? Stay tuned — it’s coming. If you go to one of those big James River plantations in Virginia (I forget which) you find a sign near the shore saying that this was the site of the first American Thanksgiving in (I think) 1615 or thereabouts. A bit of digging exhumes the fact that about three British sailors and an exhausted Anglican parson made it ashore after a terrible Atlantic crossing, fell to their knees on the sand and gave thanks for their deliverance. But elsewhere in America, Everyone knows that it was the Pilgrim Fathers in today’s Massachusetts who had the first Real Thanksgiving (some historical revisionists believe that this story actually reflects the North’s post-Civil War rewriting of American history to privilege (as we academics say) the New England story over the more benighted rest of the country.
And recently it’s been pointed out that both these stories are wrong. The first Thanksgiving actually took place in what is today’s Florida in the late 16th, in a settlement of French Huguenot refugees who had fled the persecutions of the Sun King after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which had heretofore granted religious toleration. The Florida Huguenots, unlike the P.Fs, however, left no story, for they were wiped out shortly thereafter by the forces of Spain, who massacred them — not because they were French, the authorities obligingly explained, but because they were Protestant heretics, thereby making it OK.
This topic and the thread on Marilynne Robinson, who calls religion the structure on which our culture has traditionally made meaning struck some chords with me. Heads up: Rambling personal narrative unfolds below.
As a child, all our Christmases were secular. There was a tree, but no church, no religious carols, no Jesus, and only UNICEF cards with vague wishes for “peace on earth.”
There were exhausting trips to accommodate demanding grandparents for whom it was unacceptable to celebrate any day except Christmas Eve night or Christmas morning.
The holiday was made up of excessive eating and drinking; endless complaints from my mother about how tiring it was to come up with a new theme for the tree each year; trangled whispered arguments between my parents because my dad was hiding out in the garage and not doing his part. By New Year’s Eve, nobody was speaking to anyone else.
My parents tried once to instill some kind of spiritual meaning in the season by reading us the Christmas story from the King James Bible, but it was so heavily interrupted with asides about the parts we were to reject as myth (the star, the virgin birth, the prophecy of the seed of Jesse), that my brother and I really didn’t know what to make of how we fit into the picture.
Our family were simply pretending to be Christians, going for the Madison Avenue version of Christmas, and that strain was palpable. When I first read “A Christmas Carol” and encountered Scrooge’s comment that he’d like to drive a stake of holly in the hearts of everyone who went around with “Merry Christmas” on their lips, I thought “ditto.” Lord, what was there to celebrate about a season that turned your family into nut bars.
Christmas still gives me the willies, though in the intervening decades since childhood, I have come to understand why my parents rejected organized religion and why they believe what they do.
I also realize that they were trying to provide a sense of connection for us to the larger culture, even if only through the empty trappings of a religion in which they had no faith. And it was, ironically, the hollow nature of our Christmas celebrations that led my brother and me to try to figure out what it really meant, inquire after more traditional notions of Christianity. Much to our parents’ chagrin.
It seems to me that structure of religion that Robinson talked about is as strong as ever, able to support even the doubts and even antagonism of my parents’ unbelief. Perhaps the insanity that is the modern, secular Christmas is God’s modern challenge to us, a call to resist and reject the Madison Avenue Christmas, to steel ourselves against the cacophony of the season and to find the discipline to still our minds, to see beyond the tinsel and into the homes of the poor, the sick, the marginalized, and even the hearts of those whose faith is weak, where Jesus was born and still lives.
And, ye gods, did Pat Buchanan call Canada “Canuckastan”?
There is some interesting history on the battle for Christmas
http://www.unityinchrist.com/history/print/cotton.htm
The book on which those remarks are based is Stephen Nissenbaum’s The Battle for Christmas, which says:
“In return for ensuring massive observance of the anniversary of the Savior’s birth by assigning it to this resonant date, the Church for its part tacitly agreed to allow the holiday to be celebrated more or less the way it always had been. From the beginning, the Church’s hold over Christmas was (and remains still) rather tenuous. There were always people for whom Christmas was a time of pious devotion rather than carnival, but such people were always in the minority. It may not be going too far to say that Christmas has always been an extremely difficult holiday to Christianize.” (p.7)
IOW, the war over Christmas is much older than consumerism or other modern phenomena. It is an enduring part of our culture given to us by the Puritans. Maybe we should remember that today, when we, in totally un-Puritan fashion, celebrate a holiday commemorating people who did not believe in holidays.
Thanks, those were three most informative posts. And Jean, yes he did and he even repeated it when interviewed on CBC. It is was in the post 9/11 frenzy era (has that ended yet?). In response someone in Quebec wrote, as a put down, the national Anthem of Canukistan. The CBC “As it Happens” news affair program is currently taking requests for repeats, (favorite pieces) and someone from Portland OR requested it, so it was fresh in my memory.
True, but we pretty much lose Advent. (Imagine trying to properly observe lent in the midst of a nearly inescapable, month and a half long cultural celebration of chocolate, eggs, and bunnies.)
I actually see it the other way around — the liturgical season of Advent is our secret weapon, what keeps us grounded in the midst of Santamania. The other day, in a toy store, I saw some “Advent Calendars” that were actually just 24-piece playsets. They didn’t even have a winter theme, let alone a religious/Christmas theme. They were just meant to let kids “count down to Christmas” by getting a little toy every day in December. That touched a nerve, I must say: you can’t secularize ADVENT, for heaven’s sake!
Anyway, I feel like I already do observe Lent in the midst of a six-week bunnies-and-candy frenzy. Every time I go into a drug store I have to pass racks of Cadbury eggs, which makes the self-denial that much more difficult. Especially since I know they’ll disappear as soon as Easter Sunday is over!
First, I don’t beleive FDR caused ourmaterialism (talk about history being interpretation.)
Second, the financial crisis is rooted in complex problems on Wall St. There is still hope we can get out of the mess.
Third, Medicare and Social Security can be fixed if we move away from political gridlock and have everybody working together for the common good.
Fourth, I think the “secularization of society” is a fiction by those who wish their view of Christianity to reign here.
Fifth, the rise of “happy holidays” is rooted in avoiding litigation through promoting political correctness. If it really pulls someone’s chain, see comment four.
The feast of the Incarnation shows us beieivers how God enterred this poor old world and maybe should make us rethink how we look at it.
So, in advance,
-Happy Thanksgiving today
-Happy Hannukah
-Merry Christmas.
If any of the above offends you, you’re on the wrong blog!
–Anyway, I feel like I already do observe Lent in the midst of a six-week bunnies-and-candy frenzy.–
Blowing up Peeps in the microwave for Lent is one of our family traditions. (My kid puts them on a graham cracker and has some type of hideous s’more like thing when they’ve deflated.)
But, then, sweets have never been my particular downfall.
Eeek, the timer is going off, which means something needs to be basted or stirred, but Happy Thanksgiving to you in “Canuckistan.” Pat Buchanan often provides some unintended comic relief, though I realize not everyone finds militant ignorance as hilarious as I do.
Time for a short postprandial post…
In another life I lived for several years on a remote island in the South Pacific. Christmas there was a purely religious observance. Strangely, I missed the exchanging of gifts, etc. during my first Christmas there. That, and the lack of snow in the 80 degree weather. By my second year, I eagerly looked forward to celebrating Advent and Christmas without any commercial trappings. Midnight Mass was outdoors, under the Southern Cross. One surreal touch: The QE II, on its way to Sydney, passed about 15 miles offshore shortly after Mass was over. It looked like a city of lights gliding slowly over the water, made all the more unusual to the local people because there was no electricity on the island. Still, an unforgettable Christmas.
True story….anecdote bu perhaps revealing.
A relative in the US had a daughter in public school. She was around 9 or 10. she was exuberant and was saying Merry Christmas to everyone. A teacher told her that she couldn”t say that. She had to say Happy Holidays.
The young girl felt ashamed.
Rest assured she won”t make that mistake again.
It had an impact.
Happy Holidays it is.
The mother has no agenda, will go on no crusade, she is a simple woman who will comply.
Strange, but we here in the southern part of India, surrounded by Hindus and Muslims, have no problem wishing anyone “Merry Christmas”. Many of those Hindus and Muslims wish us too.
Political correctness goes too far in the U.S I think. Like one girl here said, “I am not visually challenged, I am blind”
Sunil:
Therein lies the difference between a culture that is open and receptive to religious diversity and a culture that is uncomfortable with any expression of religious feeling or conviction.
The West is characteized by the latter and Eastern countries more the former.
Berdyaev once observed that the East is the land of revelation and the West of rationality. The West has not produced one religion or tradition whereas the East has given birth to a plethora.
Let’s take the Ad out of Advent?
-Let’s take the Ad out of Advent?–
And then we’d just vent, which would make that my favorite time of year.
George D, I’m sure that there are people cracking down on “Merry Christmas,” and I think you are right that there’s a difference between being open to religious diversity and simply being uncomfortable with religion in general.
But I wonder how often the “no Merry Christmas” comments occur.
Like Sunil, I get wished “Merry Christmas” by co-workers, friends and students of other faiths at the public university where I teach.
And I usually try to be aware of their holidays and offer appropriate felicitations on their observances. In fact, it’s required that we alert students to upcoming holidays that fall on class days and make sure they know they can take time off without penalty of absence.
But, then, dealing with non-Christians has never made me nervous. It’s walking the minefield among the various Christian denominations I find nerve-wracking.
One of the fallacies behind all the “War on Christmas” nonsense is the idea that the greeting “Happy Holidays” is an attempt to deny the religious origins of Christmas. As I noted in my post, the “holiday season” is so called because there are a number of holidays celebrated within the space of a few weeks — and this is true even if you prefer to ignore the presence of non-Christians among us. Saying “Happy Holidays” (or “Seasons Greetings”) covers all your bases.
Let’s take the Ad out of Advent? Now this I can get behind! Although I guess maybe that’s what I’m doing already, as Jean points out.
Jean:
“But I wonder how often the “no Merry Christmas” comments occur.”
I wonder how often racist comments actually occur but we certainly heard anecdotes, which were shared on this blog.These small anecdotes were taken as symbolic of a dark underbelly among McCain/Palin supporters and deeply troubling issues in the American culture. I concede that this actually warranted some degree of critical engagement.
Yet I share a true anecdote which rings true with other people’s experience – and these concerns are minimized and marginalized. (“venting”)
Gee too bad I am not a woman I could chalk it up to being dismissed as hysterical.
Mollie:
“…As I noted in my post, the “holiday season” is so called because there are a number of holidays celebrated within the space of a few weeks…”
Chanukkah is at best (AT BEST) a minor Jewish holiday. It is not even mentioned in the Torah. Were it not due to the fact that it falls so close to Christmas it would not even be emphasized and would likely not even be celebrated by most Jews.
Kwanza was created in the 1960′s by a social activist to honour African traditions. It isn’t rooted in any indingenous African celebration (to my knowledge).
Now the mid-winter soltice does in fact have a long tradition although a lot of it arises from pre-scientific mythologies. Arguably the Church appropriated this pagan holiday as a symbol for the light of Christ emerging into the world. There are very few pagan religious traditions that have survived that could credibly root themselves in this tradition. Certainly all the Christmas lights, etc. could easily be appropriated by non-Christians but I fail to see what the issue is with referring to the season as Christmas since this is the cultural connotation associated with lights.
Historically, culturally, religiously (including the spirit, etc) the period week of the 25th is Christmas. This is a historically undeniable fact. Clearly all the “other holiday” occurring at this time is a reaction AGAINST the association of Christmas (or that season) with Christianity.
George D., my “venting” comment wasn’t aimed at you. And I’m sorry the little girl with the overly compliant mother in your anecdote got the smack-down from overly politically correct teacher.
However, I’m just wondering out loud whether a) the majority of public school children are told not to say “merry Christmas” (never happened in my world before) nor b) that saying “happy holidays” means someone dislikes Christmas.
My theory, and it’s only just that, is that “happy holidays” originated in the retail sales world (like “have a nice day” during the un-holiday season), and that the greeting has leached mindlessly into the common vernacular that way instead of through the Forces of Darkness.
And, boy, it’s all the self control I can muster not to make a comment involving Midol at this particular point, so I’ll go do up those dishes and make some supper instead.
Jean:
I doubt it is the majority of public school children would experience that but I would bet it would be a significant minority (what is statistically significant 5 – 10 %??) that were told that at least once in their public school experience. But it is at least significant enough to pay attention to and enter into rerspectful public dialogue about.
I don’t think saying Happy Holidays necessarily implies that someone dislikes Christmas and it may have its genesis in sales. Yet sales respond to the market and the market is shaped by the culture and there has been a definite shift in the culture.
While an individual saying “Happy Holidays” may have benign motives the basis for it making its way into the lexicon is due to a clear desire to re-engineer of society which always has its genesis among the elites.
The reaction may be the death throes of Christendom (which I am all for finally dying) or it may be a more organized attempt to undermine Christianity (which I am not for)….or both.
I think the two contributors, Mollie and Cathleen who posted stories on this issue were a bit to facile and dismissivie in their analysis of the issue. The concern is not unfounded.
I think a lot depends on where you live.
I went from being school counselor at a small elementary school in New Hampshire to the same position in a highly diverse school just outside DC.
In the NH school, it really would have sounded stilted to say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christimas” before, uh… Christmas break. But in Arlington, it would have been presumptuous and impolite to say “Merry Christmas” in a school where it was common to overhear kids ask other kids, “What’s your home country?”
–While an individual saying “Happy Holidays” may have benign motives the basis for it mostly Christian and Republican, who served on our school board and determined our public school cumaking its way into the lexicon is due to a clear desire to re-engineer of society which always has its genesis among the elites.–
Point taken George. But I think social re-engineering can happen on both ends of the political spectrum. Look, for example, at what conservative spin meister Frank Luntz did when he started calling the estate tax, “death tax.”
Or, to draw on a more personal example, when I was a kid (back in the 50s/early 60s), our public school music teacher taught a lot of Christian religious music, especially African-American spirituals.
My Unitarian parents deeply disliked the religious content of the music curriculum, and they would have agreed with you that this was social engineering promulgated by the elite Christian Republicans who ran our school board.
Our Unitarian Fellowship began adding Jewish music to its religious education curriculum, and I think I can still sing “Hava Nagila” all through.
But as far as Mother was concerned, the fact that my brother and I became mainstream Christians was proof of the success of the social engineering of the elite. “Swing Low” and “Down by the Riverside” got stuck in our heads and turned our little brains to mush, later allowing Methodists, Episcopalians and finally (in my case) actual Catholics (the horror!) to worm their way into our heads and mold us to their will.
A blessed (Ad)vent to all!
How about this. A holiday is by rights and by origin a holy day. Are you with me? So simply resolve that when someone says “Happy Holidays” to you that amounts to “Happy Holy Days”. The expression is interreligious, and therefore religious, and also multicultural. As for the “happy” part, “happy” is a notoriously multivariant word. But you are always free to use it– and also to interpret it when others use it in this cas–according to your own beliefs. Ambiguity can sometimes lead to peace! Consider CE. It can abbreviate “Common Era” but also “Christian Era”–which histotically its does, with a slight degree of imprecision because Jesus was then born well before the Christian Era–but why bring upo these niceties. Be happy with your interpretation! Notice also that CE avoids the oddity of expressions like “the 1st century AD”, wich is at least ungrammatical.
Oops. “which”
And how about this. Sing Happy Holidays, as Bing Crosby sang it in Hliday Inn 53 years ago:
While the merry bells keep ringing
May your every wish come true
Happy holiday
Happy holiday
May the calendar keep bringing
HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO YOU
If you’re burdened down with trouble
If your nerves are wearing thin
Pack your load
Down the road
And come to Holiday Inn
If the traffic noise affects you
Like a squeaky violin
Kick your cares
Down the stairs
And come to Holiday Inn
If you can’t find someone who
Will set your heart a whirl
Take your car and motor to
The home of boy meets girl
If you’re laid-up with a breakdown
Throw away your vitamin
Don’t get worse
Grab your nurse
And come to Holiday Inn.
George D: When I was in school, I went home by December 23rd and didn’t come back till January 2nd or later. So my classmates and I said “Happy Holidays” to each other, meaning: enjoy Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day, and all the days off in between. That’s really what I had in mind. Also, Joseph Gannon makes a good point re: “Holy Days.” Especially considering the number of Christian feast days clustered around Christmas. But I really ought to stop commenting, I suppose, since I think the ridiculousness of this whole topic ought to speak for itself.
Mollie:
….my point is not specifically Merry Christmas vs. Happy Holidays……The Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays thing is like the proverbial toothpaste being squeezed in the middle. Irritating yes but points to deeper core issues..
The linguistic controversy around the whole “Happy Holiday” or “Merry Christmas” issue does not exist in a vacuum. It exists within the context of public displays of the seasons and controversies that surround these – controversies around displays of crèche’s in public spaces or semi-public spaces like a stores, malls, universities or schools.
This in turns leads to a controversy around the establishment clause of the constitution and how that should be interpreted with respect to the role of religion in public life. That of course is simply one more manifestation of the issue of secularity and plurality in tension with religious freedom.
It is also a debate concerning narratives regarding our collective Western history. What is the role of Christianity in shaping culture? Is it accidental or is it or (has it been) an integral component in shaping Western culture?
These subtexts, along with many others, factor into the passion with which the season’s nomenclature is debated.
I realize it can be a bit tedious and exhausting but the fact that they arise shows that these questions have not been adequately resolved…….
PS
In my work place I am not even a fan of Christmas trees or any kind of decorations (or Halloween or Thanksgiving or Easter). I am a pleasant enough person but maybe I am just unsentimental.
I am even less of a fan of the whole secret Santa pull a name out of a hat and buy a present for a co-worker under 20 dollars. A few years back I was successful in squashing that. I said lets all just give 10 dollars and donate it to a charity of our choice in our name. Lets just strike an ad hoc sub committee who can be empowered to make the decision of the charity on our behalf.
I mean the 10 dollars went into a collective kitty whcih amounted to 200 dollars or something like that donated to a charity in our organization”s or department’s name.