Starbuck’s war on Christmas doesn’t exist

By Troy Daugherty

War on Christmas?

There has been a lot of talk recently about the red cup controversy surrounding Starbucks.

It all started on Nov. 5, when a man by the name of Joshua Feuerstein posted a video on Facebook saying that the company had purposely chosen to remove Christmas and Christ from their cups.

That’s why they are plain red now. Starbucks actually responded to the criticism by stating that they made them plain red so people could write and draw their own messages on the cups.

Some people are now boycotting the company or rebelling against it by saying that their name is “Merry Christmas” so the workers have to write “Merry Christmas” on the cup.

This is actually just a continuation of a trend that has been going on a lot over the last couple years: the war on Christmas.

People have heard on the news a lot recently, especially Fox News, that there is a war on Christmas being waged; that companies and people in general are just against Christmas and the holiday spirit now.

They would have people believe that Christmas is soon going to disappear and that they are being treated unfairly because bullies are trying to make room for the other religions by getting rid of theirs.

There’s only one problem with this idea: The Pew Research Center did a study last year that showed that 70.6% of people in the United States identify as some form of Christian.

On top of that, the same study showed that the United States has more Christians than any other country in the world. Meanwhile, non-Christian faiths, like Jews and Muslims, only made up 5.9%, with all of them combined.

Atheists, agnostics, and no affiliation made up the second largest group with a combined 22.8%.

That’s less than one-third the number of Christians.

So how are these minority groups managing to beat up on the Christian faith? They’re not.

Just because companies have started to take some of the Christmas-based things off of their merchandise —so they appeal to the other portions of the population as well — does not mean they hate Christians.

Overall, it’s just a realistic marketing scheme.

Companies aren’t going to put “Merry Christmas” on products if it potentially offends nearly 30% of all consumers.

Instead they remove the words to make it a generalized holiday item and it sells more, which is what most companies care about.

So next time someone speaks about a war on Christmas, throw some statistics in their face and maybe they’ll stop talking.

And if they mention the Starbucks cups, ask them this: Why did they choose red to go with their green label?

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