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By Andrea Peyser
November 23, 2015
Hey Starbucks, I want my Christmas cup back!
When I was growing up in Queens, my family celebrated Christmas in a traditional manner. We saw the latest flick at the local movie house, drank a boatload of eggnog that I started lacing with Captain Morgan spiced rum, then chowed down at Chinese restaurant Joy Teang on spare ribs and pork lo mein.
Hey, we were Jewish, not kosher. Low fat and sober? I don’t think so.
Good times.
I hate to be the one to sound the alarm, particularly after leftist TV talker Bill Maher tried to shame me into believing the “War on Christmas” was a figment of right-wing imaginations, but there seems to be a concerted effort by grinches who don’t suck down enough rum to strip the “oy” out of “joy.”
I want my Christmas cups back, Starbucks!
The coffee giant fired the first shot in this season’s annual skirmish by stripping any evidence of Christmas (or winter) from the cups on which hostile baristas tend to mis-scrawl my name as “Adrian.”
Gone are the pictures of wreaths we’ve seen Christmas seasons past. Forget about stars, which might remind customers of the Nativity scene. Terrified of offending anyone who’s not Christian (or doesn’t live in the frigid North), Starbucks removed renderings of snowflakes and snowmen from the cups, opting for a uniformly red design — an irreligious insult broken up only by the company’s green-and-white logo.
I’m not down with Joshua Feuerstein, an Arizona evangelist who declared in a viral video that Starbucks “hates Jesus.” But I can see how a fear of lawsuits has driven a corporation into atheistic paroxysms.
My Spidey sense perked up as I read the statement from Jeffrey Fields, Starbucks’ vice president of design and content. (This exists.)
“This year, we wanted to usher in the holidays with a purity of design that welcomes all of our stories. We’re embracing the simplicity and the quietness of it.” Aside from this politically correct rubbish about inclusivity (and creepy “purity”), Fields avoided the word “Christmas” as if it might bite him the butt.
Each year, it seems that we fight a War on Christmas that the left claims doesn’t exist. At Cherry Hill Mall in New Jersey, kids for the first time this year were charged $35 to $50 a pop to sit on the lap of someone in a Santa Claus suit and take home photos or videos of the privilege. Customer fury prompted greedy mall overlords to make Santa-sitting free again.
At the Roosevelt Field shopping mall on Long Island, terror of offending those who abhor Christmas trees prompted retail brass to dump the shrub and Santa’s Village and deposit St. Nick in a “glacier” that looked like something out of “Star Trek” rather than the North Pole.
After The Post published a story about the absurd ode to multiculturalism and sci-fi, the mall’s president announced this month that Santa’s sleigh was flying back to Roosevelt Field, along with the tree.
The McBurney YMCA in Greenwich Village five years ago fired Santa from its annual holiday luncheon, replacing him with a nondenominational Frosty the Snowman.
Schools in South Orange-Maplewood, NJ, banned religious music from concerts in 2004, silencing kids from singing “Silent Night” or “Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel.” This was tied up for years in a suit filed by a dad before the US Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 2010. The music died. Bah humbug.
As a lifelong Hebrew, celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ isn’t my thing. But in these days of international terrorism and domestic moral decay, we need religion now more than ever. I am thankful that a day exists that brings happiness and peace to the goyim I love.
Put faith back in Christmas. Bring back the music and decorated cups.
Otherwise, we’ll have no choice but to grab java at Christmas cup-friendly Dunkin’ Donuts while singing carols at the top of our lungs in a Starbucks. Anyone who fails to take this threat seriously has clearly never heard me sing.
Starbucks has been warned.