Winterval: the unpalatable making of a modern myth

In 1997 Mike Chubb was working for Birmingham city council during the rejuvenation of the city centre. As the council's head of events he and his team were charged with creating a marketing strategy to cover:

Chubb realised that with so many events competing for visitors, marketing them as individual occasions would be expensive, time-consuming and ineffective in acquiring sponsorship or funding. What the events needed, he decided, was a "generic banner under which they could all sit". His team settled on "Winterval" – a portmanteau of "winter" and "festival".

Little did he or anyone else on the events team realise that this name was to found one of the most persistent urban myths of modern times, and that 11 years later he would be writing an article explaining – again – what the event was and how it was never about renaming or banning Christmas.

How this happened makes for a fascinating story about the causes of bad journalism, the messages of irresponsible and paranoid church leaders, and badly informed, popularity-seeking politicians looking for a tabloid-friendly soundbite. The bad journalism started with the local newspaper that broke the "story" of Winterval on 8 November 1998 and travelled quickly through the national media. What is worrying is that the original story was so clearly completely untrue and contained clear statements from the council that demonstrated this.

To make things worse, it was not a myth copied and perpetuated solely by the tabloids; the broadsheets were equally responsible for repeating it, and perhaps did more to legitimise it than the tabloids. The Sunday Times, for instance, used the myth as a question and answer in three quizzes, twice in 1998 and then again in 2000.

Between them, the Times and the Sunday Times have in fact managed to repeat the myth 40 times in total since 1998, an achievement only surpassed by the Daily Mail, which leads the field with 44 mentions. The Daily Telegraph managed to repeat it 22 times, only slightly behind the Express (26), and a bit further behind the Sun (31). The Daily Mirror only seems to have repeated the myth on four occasions – less than the Guardian, which has repeated it on six occasions, even though it did eventually debunk the myth in several different articles.

The myth was not just repeated, either. It was also gradually distorted to become ever more removed from the original misconception. What started as a myth that one council had rebranded or renamed Christmas became a pluralised, open-ended narrative that "councils" and "authorities" were rebranding or renaming Christmas as "Winterval".

It then mutated from a simple rebranding to a calculated attack on Christianity by "atheists", "Muslims", or the "PC brigade" who feared offending "other faiths" or "ethnic minorities". In one extreme example, the South Wales Echo claimed that Winterval was the result of "virulent attacks on religion by atheists", which had led to "new rules such as Christmas being renamed as "Winterval". Who created and enforced this "rule" and who it applied to was not explained in the article.

In all, at least 15 articles directly claim that Christmas was renamed Winterval because of a fear of offending "other faiths". At least a further 10 articles directly claim that Winterval was used to avoid offending "ethnic minorities".

So now, thanks to perhaps one repetition too far, the Daily Mail has finally admitted that Winterval is a media fiction. But what impact will those few lines of correction have compared with the huge body of journalism that has been repeating it for so long as fact? And, more important, will Melanie Phillips offer her own apology for repeating the myth?

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