Starbucks has decided to take a very different approach to the holiday season this year.
SEATTLE — Starbucks began the season with plain red cups, which riled up the nation, causing some Christians to revolt against the multimillion-dollar corporation for the lack of Christmas spirit present on its drink containers. Some said it was an issue of freedom of religion and it was polarizing that Starbucks would take the “Christ” out of Christmas.
Others said it was simply a cowardly move of political correctness, with Donald Trump, a leader in the war against political correctness, claiming to cut the lease of the Starbucks within a Trump building. A movement has begun, encouraging Christians to say their name is “Merry Christmas” so the Starbucks employees have to say “Merry Christmas” when they call out their name — a sort of forced freedom of religion.
However, Starbucks has not taken those criticisms lightly, and it recently revealed its true ideology this past Saturday.
“Actually, the red cups have nothing at all to do with the holidays,” Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz told reporters. “The red is a sign of evil, a sign of sacrifice. It’s meant to represent the paganism that I and my associates celebrate this time of year. So it is, in fact, a war on Christmas, and an effort to bring back the pagan gods such as Zeus or Ra.”
Starbucks announced it will soon be rolling out another set of new cups with purely pagan depictions, such as hieroglyphs of Egyptian deities or imagery of the Greek gods’ wrath.
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“This is not just a company,” CFO Troy Alstead said. “This is an empire — an empire of paganism and evil. We don’t just want to root the Christ out of Christmas; we want to bring back the origins of Christmas, which were the pagan celebrations of the Winter Solstice. We want to encourage people to return to the great gods they had once forgotten. No, we don’t want to destroy freedom of religion. We just want to discourage every other religion except our own and put only the imagery of our own religion on our cups. The red was too vague, so now we’ve got to take it a step further.”
Instead of Christmas music, Starbucks now plans to make the store soundtrack consist solely of Gregorian chants and ritualistic whisperings to better create its holiday atmosphere.
“This is a true expression that we’re trying to create here at Starbucks,” Starbucks President Kevin Johnson said. “All the Christmas-themed cheer from past years was merely a guise to deceive our customers from the truth. However, we will still be selling our Christmas Blend coffee.”
Marco Omta is a freshman studying music production. Do you like the idea of cups with pagan imagery more than plain red cups? Email him at mo183714@ohio.edu.
