Seasoned Greetings

Through the holiday crush on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue last week walked a teenage girl with a stenciled poster: "How many shopping days until peace?" A few blocks away a giant billboard loomed over Times Square, bearing a Christmas message from Beatle John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono. The billboard--one of eleven put up on Los Angeles' Sunset Boulevard, London's Shaftesbury Avenue and in several European and Canadian cities--proclaimed: "The war is over ... if you want it. Happy Christmas, John and Yoko."

More and more, the trend in Christmas cards is toward seasoned greetings. Cards with a peace motif are doing better than ever. "For the first time, the dove is pushing the Madonna for the top spot," reports Stephen Shannon, head of the National Association of Greeting Card Publishers. The topical messages are not always gentle. For $1, the Black Panthers offer a selection of twelve different greetings. One card portrays a pig-faced white Santa emerging from a chimney to confront a less-than-loving reception committee: a black father toting a carbine and his little boy preparing to bash St. Nick with a small Christmas tree. The trend is not only American. In Beirut the anti-Israel terrorists of Al-Fatah are selling cards with a drawing of innocent-looking Arab youths, one of them carrying a submachine gun. Al-Fatah hopes to collect more than $100,000 from its card sales, most of which will be used for arms purchases.

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