Studio 360

First of all, I love your show!

Your segment on redesigning Christmas is such a great idea. I'm an agnostic greeting card designer, and while my family is Catholic, I'm always at a loss when designing holiday cards that send the right message, but at the same time don't exclude anyone. Pentagram did a great job!

happy dot mas!

We do need to bring back what Christmas is about. Christ!!! No greater love was ever known! We do need more love in our world and as a mother of two soldiers I will always pray for peace! May Christ always stay in Christmas! X-mas is offensive!

Somehow I missed the "peace and Love," and it just seemed like silliness. Perhaps we should call it as it really is: Christmas in the U. S. is a great festival of consumerism. The economists have recently shown us just how much of our very worth is economically based, so lets just accept it and move on.

Horrible! I'm not a card carrying Catholic, but it seems to me that Christmas is indeed the celebration of the birth of Christ, therefor a Christian holiday, not Buddist Hindu, etc. The suggestions just make the Holiday more like white bread without crust than it already is, more bland.

Fun and clever ideas! I'm all about the Xmas. Here's my contribution to your celebration:

XMAS

http://blip.tv/file/513310/

Which is my re-imagining of the "yule log"...

I was happy to hear all week about the idea of redesigning Christmas but utterly disappointed in the actual segment in this week's show. You only dealt with the shallow image of Christmas and not the true meaning of this more pagan mid-winter festival.

Christians have merely grafted the birth of Christ onto the wonderful older northern European wintertime feast of plenty etc. It represented the darkest moment in the year having planted inside of it the brightest hope. The winter solstice, when the sun reaches the lowest point in the sky, ends this descent and begins the climb towards the warmth of the summer once again.

To an old, farming, hunting people it must have marked such a hope that things were turning around and that the cycle of life and of growth would once again begin.

It's not ironic that, this year, the death of the Bush 8-year-period (the lowest point in the past century ) should be marked by the time of great hope and historic turn around.

Apparently Christmas means something different to everyone, if the above comments are any indication. Which leads me to wonder whether it's possible for any "brand" to rescue the holiday. I know the Pentagram redesign was meant to be a little tongue-in-cheek, but seriously: if Christmas is to be meaningful, shouldn't its form and meaning be specific to each individual person who celebrates it? I mean ultra-exclusive, rather than inclusive? Who cares if the guy across the street doesn't like your wreath, or whatever?

Only a comment on the design... boring, ugly and cold. It isn't fresh or new, it reminds me of computer packaging. The font is a snooze. Where's the joy of christmas, the whimsey, the warmth? It doesn't capture anything that's good about the holiday. Truly terrible design.

How odd that Christmas would be redesigned by a company named after a pagan/demonic symbol.

There was a quick acknowledgment at the beginning that some Christians oppose the idea of taking Christ out of Christmas. So what was step 1 by the designers? Literally taking Christ out of Christmas with their .mas idea. Then, there was no acknowledgment whatsoever that this design might be deeply offensive to some Christians. Bad reporting.

Plus, there are also other holidays that already end in mas (Michaelmas, Candlemas) making this idea silly. It is like if someone said we should rebrand communism and they ended up with just -ism. The whole point is lost when you take off a word stem and just keep the suffix.

There were good elements, like the point that our current Christmas imagery is overly Victorian or that red and green are ugly together. Yet overall the redesign was nonsense and the segment that featured it was badly done.

To the above comment that Christmas is just the pagan festival of Sol Invicet with Christ grafted on, this is historically inaccurate. Christmas is December 25 because it is exactly 9 months after an older festival celebrating the conception of Christ, not because it is 4 days after the solstice. It is true that recent converts from pagan religions would have brought their solstice traditions into their celebration of Christmas, but the festival is independent of the solstice.

Maybe the White Christmas motive is not the best choice for a musical motif. Its close the fist five notes of the Godfather theme. I find it menacing.

Pentagram sucks a big chubby. Very uninspiring work. Target could design a better Christmas. The font is okay.

Is the 'mas sans' font going to be available?

It would be nice to put this in practice more than just the wrapping paper.

Narrative is king. At my child's public school today, there was a segment that honored Chanukah. It told, at least acknowledged, that there was a story behind the holiday. I was pleased with that and I enjoyed my children being associated with it.

However, your crp.mas situation does nothing to move the holiday season forward. It honors none of the narratives, be it the pagan roots of Tannenbaum, the candle story of Chanukah, the reasons for the Muslim fast, or of the story of baby Jesus escaping religious persecution of the Romans.

At least acknowledge the narrative of consumerism.

Hi Laurence -- glad you liked the font. Unfortunately, Pentagram hasn't released it. But perhaps if you wrote a note to Santa...? Thanks to all for posting your thoughts on the redesign.

As far as the design is concerned I think its clever. I think it is simple in order for everyone and anyone to project their own meaning onto it. Though being that this is such an emotionally connected holiday, I think it is impossible to truly brand Christmas. You can't brand the excitement you felt the first time you left Santa Cookies, and when you couldn't sleep the whole night because you imagined every noise that you heard outside was the famous sleigh and reindeer. You can't brand the memory of that beautiful Christmas tree and just staring at it for hours as a child, amazed by all of the beautiful lights and ornaments. And you can't brand the feeling of having a wonderful meal with all of your loved ones some of whom might no longer be with you. Your personal memories make Christmas exclusive but the fact that everyone has their own Christmas memories makes the holiday inclusive. Cheers and Happy Holidays to all.