If U.S. President-elect Donald Trump were to be believed, his election last month has changed the way Americans celebrate Christmas.

“We’re gonna start saying ‘Merry Christmas’ again,” he told a rally in Michigan last week. By this week, Mr. Trump’s ‘thank you’ rallies have added an explicit Christmas fervour to it. Standing against the backdrop of Christmas trees and lights, Mr. Trump told supporters in Wisconsin on Tuesday: “So when I started 18 months ago, I told my first crowd in Wisconsin that we are going to come back here someday and we are going to say ‘Merry Christmas’ again... Merry Christmas. So, Merry Christmas everyone. Happy New Year, but Merry Christmas.”

‘War on Christmas’

At the heart of the debate is the question of whether wishing ‘Merry Christmas’ is appropriate in a religiously diverse society. Many progressive people have switched to a religiously neutral greeting of ‘happy holidays’ in recent years. Many companies also took the cue and started avoiding ‘Merry Christmas’ ads. Religious conservatives view this as an extreme form of political correctness, and have termed it a ‘war on Christmas.’

Rise of Obama blamed

Some have linked the decline of Christmas greetings to President Barack Obama’s rise. The Obamas wished ‘happy holidays’ on greeting cards always, though the President has wished Americans a “Merry Christmas” every year, in his weekly address ahead of December 25. “Thank you, everybody. Mele Kalikimaka,” Mr. Obama said on Friday, concluding what could be his final presser in office, with the Hawaiian greeting for ‘Merry Christmas.’

Presidents before him too have used ‘happy holidays’ or ‘season’s greetings’ and avoided mentioning ‘Christmas’ on cards — John F. Kennedy and Herbert Hoover, for instance.

Mr. Trump had kept the issue at the centre of his campaign since the Christmas of 2015, when a controversy erupted over Starbucks avoiding Christmas symbols on its cups as it used do to earlier. Joshua Feuerstein, an evangelical social-media personality, launched a YouTube campaign against Starbucks, which has been viewed 17 million times.

Mr. Trump, who was then a Republican primary candidate, had promised to shut down a Starbucks outlet in Trump Towers in New York in retaliation. “If I become President, we’re all going to be saying ‘Merry Christmas’ again, that I can tell you,” he had said then.

Mr. Trump is going to be President soon, and Starbucks has brought evergreen trees, reindeer and snowflakes back to its red cups this year, and its outlets are playing Christmas jingles non-stop these days.

“Most companies stopped the nonsense and Merry Christmas became a common greeting once again,” wrote Bill O’Reilly, prime-time anchor on Fox News, who has been a proponent of the ‘war on Christmas’ notion, on his blog this week.

‘Made in China’

He also warned companies such as Best Buy, Barnes & Noble and Victoria’s Secret. “Those companies are not in the Christmas spirit,” Mr. O’Reilly complained. “And that’s bad news for them, because Donald Trump is on the case.”

But all said, American Christmas remains mostly ‘Made in China, still. In 2015, ‘Christmas articles’ made up the third category among the ten items that have more than 90 per cent of the total U.S consumption coming from China. America imported more than two billion dollars worth of Christmas articles from China last year. ‘Christmas lights,’ entered as a separate category, was ninth on the list, which was worth $500 million. This year, imports worth $1.1 billion under ‘Christmas articles”, and $346 million under “Christmas lights” have been made from China.