Group Plans to 'Steal' Christmas

This holiday season in Cambridge may be an unusual one, if a new student group called the Grinch Army Faction has its way.

The group, which held its second meeting last night, plans dis-Christmas carols, posters of Jesus carrying a shopping bag and mock-battles staged at toy stores busy with holiday shoppers to mark the Christmas season.

The point of the demonstrations, members said at last night's gathering in the Greenhouse Cafe, will be to remind Cantabridgians that Christmas is more than an excuse to go shopping. The Grinch Army Faction, composed of self-styled anarchists, will experiment with a variety of satirical vehicles for getting that point across, members added.

"We want to be a presence of humorous satire. The issues we want to address are consumerism and the depression" which hits many people during the Christmas season, said Phillip N. Fucella '90.

The Grinch Army Faction will make its first appearance this Friday at a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) lecture on anarchism, Fucella said. He added that the group will sing two "dis-Christmas carols" before the speech, entitled "Josiah Warren--The First American Anarchist."

"We want to focus on 'Jesus the cool person,'" said Scott St. John, who works at MIT. "Would Jesus have bought his children Nintendo? Did he go shopping for weeks? No way. Jesus wasn't that kind of guy," he said.

If the Grinch Army Faction can't persuade holiday shoppers to forego present buying, it aims at least to convince parents that they should avoid buying war toys for their children, Fucella said. Shoppers may think twice before buying toy guns and other weaponsfor children after watching the fake battles intoy stores that the group plans to stage, headded.

But while focusing on Christmascommercialization, the group will also emphasizesuch issues as nuclear disarmament and globalpeace, Fucella said.

"We can argue forever about the originalmeaning of Christmas," said Seth A. Gordon, an MITsophomore who is majoring in political science."But these are values we think are being lost inthe commercialism and hype.