The constitution and religious festivals in America - 24 December 1993

I've just come on the first piece I wrote, not a talk, a despatch, newspaper despatch or as my old Manchester editor preferred to say, your message.

Anyway it's the first thing I can find that I wrote about an American Christmas, the dateline 24 December 1946. It was of course written from and about New York City, but to suggest something of the Christmas flavour elsewhere I noticed that I'd just had a postcard from Florida containing the gentle sneer of a friend lying half naked under a coconut palm. By the same post came an apology from an invited guest who was buried in his farm in Vermont under 13 inches of snow.

From Hollywood an English actor new to the place was marvelling at the diligence of his studio in providing the proper landscape for a children's party by depositing on the back lot a snow storm manufactured from sand and limestone with a coating of cornflakes. Now that sounds like an obvious fake not so, it's what you see all the time in the movies for a snow scene when they don't want to run up the expense of going on location in the High Sierra, but New York Christmas 1946 was mild, cloudy, in the low 40s. I was surprised to read in my piece that the one, I think the one charming feature of a New York Christmas today which I'd have guessed started perhaps in the 1970s was there in embryo 47 years ago. There is running down the middle of Park Avenue from 96th Street, 50 blocks to 46th Street a narrow plot of fenced in greenery that divides the north bound cars from the south bound, I say cars and not traffic because commercial traffic is forbidden.

Well it seems that just before Christmas 1946 there appeared some newly planted fir trees one every two blocks, each contained innumerable tiny white lights and the Sunday before Christmas that year they were switched on for the first time. Well by now there are two firs every block, so from the hilly eminence of 96th Street you look down and for three miles see what look likes a continuous row of these sparkling trees. What's special about them is a taboo imposed by the Park Avenue Association, which is a residents group, no coloured lights allowed. Each tree is studded with about 2,000 bulbs, there no bigger than pin points of light all oyster white, so the only colour that you see is the alternating green and red of the changing traffic lights it's a splendid sight.

Those first 30 trees and the present 100 are the gift of one old lady who's also responsible for the great stream of tulips at one time of the year, for the apple and cherry blossom in the fall, she's also the benefactor of innumerable charities and with her late husband co-founded a famous medical research foundation. I think there's no point in being mysterious about her name, she's 94 in failing health and the great vista down Park Avenue these nights reminds us of what New Yorkers owe to Mary Lasker. That it now strikes me as just about the most lasting feature of Christmas in New York, everything else is just more of the same, more people, more bulging noisy stores, fewer assistants, more broken down Santa Claus's shaking tiny bells with paused hands and the traffic. We swore 20 years ago, it would one Christmas time freeze once for all, it didn't it hasn't; now it just twitches.

In celebrating Christmas in putting up the decorations that go with it, there is one problem chronic throughout the United States acute in New York City that should make the English for once rather thankful for the Church of England no matter how irreligious they maybe, grateful for the fact that the UK has a state religion and then no matter what Christian assembly or image you put up anywhere, there aren't going to be neighbourly quarrels, small riots, lawsuits and in the end expensive appeals all the way to the high court.

Believe me; I speak nothing but literal truth. Remember first that the First Amendment to the Constitution, the first article of the Bill of Rights in fact the very first phrase is come Christmas time the mischief maker. It sounds like many clauses in the Constitution so simple, so honest, so impossible to misunderstand. Yet, its very simplicity its beautiful transparency lets people see in it every variety of tricky interpretation, chicanery, honest doubt. It is, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof".

Now in the past month there have been two other religious festivals that impinge on the coming Christian festival Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, which I doubt is yet in your dictionaries, it's a new one we're going to have to respect. It's an African harvest festival holiday and I have no doubt that this year, next year not too far away it will be declared a holiday for all blacks or as we must now say African Americans. It has its rituals and practices and decorations, which we've barely begun to learn about. Hanukkah is something else and in a city where one third of all American Jews reside, it's one festival that receives plenty of celebration, so what's the problem I'm talking about? How to celebrate your religion without appearing to impose it on the neighbours, in essence that's it.

Five years ago in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, once the iron then steel capital of the country, in Pittsburgh at just this time of the year a Christmas tree was set up on the steps of City Hall, the town hall. Next to it, someone had set up a menorah, not a mile away just outside the county courthouse there stood all alone buttressed by no symbol of another faith a creche. Well protests flew from far and wide, Jews objected to the Christmas tree, Christians objected to the adjoining menorah. As for the creche, all sorts of people protested, atheists, non-conformists, agnostics, everyone got in the act who was offended by the lonely isolated display of the symbol of one denomination of one religion. Outrage raged through the city.

It went to the courts and in the end to the court, to the nine stages of the United States Supreme Court and they concluded looking at hard at the First Amendment that the Christmas tree and the menorah side by side did not imply the city's preference for one faith over another, but the creche had to come down. It would be all right if it had been confined say inside the railings of a Catholic church, but right there standing in front of public property offensive unconstitutional.

Pity, wrote a journalist the other day, pity the public school principal when the kids start to decorate, every decoration is fraught with peril, every lesson, every song, every carol must pass the does-not-promote-a-particular-religion test.

In Washington DC, what the news announcers call rightly the nations capital, there's an interesting switch this year a performance of Dickens's Christmas Carol adapted to the, what shall I say, to the zeitgeist – spirit, the social climate of the nation's capital, which is also you may remember the homicide capital of the United States. You remember the former mayor of the City who was much mocked for saying that apart from the homicide rate, Washington is one of the safest cities in the United States, he was quite right. If you were to look over an aerial map of Washington, you could mark a very small segment of it maybe no more than a 50th of the city's total area, it's mostly a black section, it's where over 90% of all the stabbings and random shootings and homicides take place. So in this Washington version of Dickens, Scrooge is a lone shark in a black slum, Bob Cratchit an unemployed chef, his wife slaves away in Scrooge's unheated office. TT, Tiny Tim, of course is in a wheelchair and not likely to be miraculously cured, he was shot in the spine by a random bullet while he was out playing in the street.

Come to think of it, this might very well be Dickens's version if he were alive and writing now in Washington, for all his vast popularity, many comfortable people greatly resented his novels because they so often dealt with very uncomfortable themes like vice and poverty, but then again I recall that the Christmas Carol was written as a deliberate exercise is escapism from just such meanness and dirt and poverty. Dickens was in Manchester and he took a walk as he always did through a part of town respectable people never saw and he saw hideous poverty and filth and it was raining and the pavements were as they were in my boyhood, mud slides. He hurried back to his lodgings, sat down and conceived the Carol which to this day – if you can't bear the sight of the streets and the homeless and the threat of crime – is still an elixir, being the only tale I know by a first-rate author in which a mean, grumpy man totally changes his character and becomes benevolent, merry, kind and generous.

Let's all try it over Christmas or Hanukkah or Kwanzaa just for a few days. Now I'll wish you what used to be the standard English greeting and is now it seems wholly American 'A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year'. Four years in a row I've begged to know from some old listener when did it change? Certainly some time after the Second War, no Englishman in my time through my 30s ever said a "Happy Christmas" but nobody ever responds. Where are the great inquisitive social historians, where are Robert Birchfield, John Wells, Nicholas Jones, Henry Potroski, Alan Palmer, wherever they are a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC. Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.