Monica Seles Quotes
I never really did Christmas before. Christmas Day? I mean - what's that? What's it all about? I was always flying on Christmas Day.
Seles, Monica. Getting a Grip: On My Body, My Mind, My Self. Avery, 2009.
This is a quotation which shows that Christmas was not a Christian Holiday that was commonly celebrated in early America. The reason that this is important is when there were many legal battles of public schools and municipalities celebrating Christmas and exhibiting crèches and Christmas trees, several of the proponents argued the doctrine of originalism—namely that we should not declare unconstitutional anything that was common and accepted at the time of the Constitution’s writing, debating, and ratification. They argued that the First Amendment was not intended to cover celebrations of Christmas as the founding fathers would not have made unconstitutional that which was common. While the principle of originalism has advocates and critics, the originalism theory does not hold regarding Christmas because Christmas was not commonly celebrated in early America. In no state was Christmas a holiday, and there were jurisdictions that had actually outlawed the celebration of Christmas which was associated with Catholics and not all of them. See {629845} for another.
Monica Seles is a retired professional tennis player, who represented Yugoslavia and the United States. She was born and raised in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia (now Serbia) to an ethnic Hungarian family. She became a naturalized American citizen in 1994 and also received Hungarian citizenship in June 2007. A former world no. 1, she won nine Grand Slam singles titles, eight of them as a teenager while representing Yugoslavia, and the final one while representing the United States.
