December 31, 2004

WAR AGAINST CHRISTMAS 2004 COMPETITION
[I] [II] [III] [IV] [V] [VI] [VII] [VIII] [IX] [X] [XI] [XII] [XIII] [XIV] [XV] [XVI] [XVII] [XVIII] [XX] - See also: War Against Christmas 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000

An Exchange With Google [Craig Nelsen]

[email protected] wrote:

Thank you for your note. We understand your concern about our holiday logo, and we appreciate your feedback about celebrating Christmas. At Google, we do not celebrate religious holidays in our homepage doodles. This is mostly a matter of practicality and fairness, as celebrating one such occasion would lead to the obvious and irrefutable expectation that we should celebrate all such holidays. Thus, instead of depicting Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and Ramadan, we observed the season with polar bears making snow cone presents for their friends. We hope to communicate a feeling of joyousness to all of our users, regardless of their specific beliefs. We're committed to celebrating the diversity of our users worldwide and will keep your feedback in mind for the future. Regards, The Google Team

Craig Nelsen replied: Thanks for your reply, Google, but I fail to see how festooning the Google logo with Christmas cheer creates an "obvious and irrefutable expectation" that at some point the Google logo has to be draped in ayahuasca vines lest the practitioners of Santo Daime take offense.

Who, exactly, is it, with all this scary expectation?

I also fail to see how celebrating Christmas somehow prevents us all from gleefully celebrating diversity—a religion in itself, incidentally, found only in the smug and naive West.

I also fail to see how, given its overt ethnocentricity, noting the Chinese New Year, which you guys never miss, is somehow not an assault on your precious diversity, but noting Christmas, which is celebrated the world over by a group of people with diversity out the ying yang, is somehow a threat to the common good.

(Incidentally, the most packed—and, as it turned out, the most moving—Christmas service I ever attended was in 1996 in a church in Taiyuan, Shanxi Province, PRC).

Anyway, I'm disappointed. I thought Google was cooler than all that.

Instead, you just look like a bunch of wet-behind-the-ears ninnies stuck back in the dopey 90s.

[Craig Nelson runs Project USA and contributed this great item to our 2000 War Against Christmas Competition]