Amazon Labels Christmas Nativity Story as 'Christian Holiday Fiction'
Jeff Bezos' retail giant launches latest attack in the 'War on Christmas'
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Online retail giant Amazon is the latest corporation to join the "War on Christmas" after the Jeff Bezos-owned company labeled a book about the birth of Jesus Christ as "Christian holiday fiction."
Amazon is touting a new children’s book narrating Christmas nativity story as its “#1 New Release in Children’s Christian Holiday Fiction.”
The book, The First Christmas, by Breitbart's Rome Bureau Chief Thomas D. Williams, is an illustrated children’s poem describing the nativity of Jesus.
The story is told in anapestic tetrameter, the same poetic meter used in Clement Clarke Moore’s classic Christmas poem, A Visit from Saint Nicholas.
However, Williams’s book actually tells the Nativity story exactly as recounted in the gospels of Saints Luke and Matthew, without the addition of fictional embellishments, unlike A Visit from Saint Nicholas and other “holiday” poems.
Therefore, by calling the book “Holiday Fiction,” Amazon would seem to suggest it believes that the Christian Bible's recounting of the birth of Jesus is simply an imaginative fabrication.
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If this is the case, Amazon is decidedly out of touch with its American constituency, according to Breitbart.
According to a 2017 survey by the Pew Research Center, a striking 66 percent of U.S. adults believe that Jesus was miraculously born to the Virgin Mary on Christmas.
Pew found that a full three quarters (75 percent) of Americans still believe that the baby Jesus was born in Bethlehem and laid in a manger and 68 percent believe that three Magi from the East brought Jesus gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
More than two-thirds (67 percent) believe the biblical count of an angel appearing to shepherds to announce the birth of Jesus, roughly the same percentage as those who believe in the virgin birth.
Even among millennials, belief in each of the four components of the Nativity account exceeds 50 percent.
Pew found that 55 percent of millennials believe in the virgin birth, 54 percent believe that an angel announced Jesus’ birth to shepherds, 57 percent believe that the three magi came bringing him gifts, and 65 percent believe that the infant Jesus was laid in a manger.
According to the study, 90 percent of the U.S. population still celebrates Christmas as a holiday, and a slight majority (51%) say they plan to attend religious services on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day.
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Just last week, as the build-up to the festive season is only just getting started, this year's "War on Christmas" already took its first casualty.
Firing the first shot against the annual Christian holiday was American coffee chain Starbucks, who refuses to use the word "Christmas" on its newly-revealed seasonal cups.
The caffeinated beverage giant unveiled four new seasonal cups, yet not a single one of them uses the word “Christmas.”
Despite the season being centered around a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, the word that bears his name is awkwardly absent from their promotional products.
The closest Starbucks dares to get to the "offensive" word Christmas is with the phrase “Merry Coffee” on two of the four designs
Another newly designed cup sleeve says “We wish you a merry coffee.”
