‘Tis the season.
The one for peace on earth and glad tidings and reflections upon the birth of Christ. The one for good will toward men (we’ll count women in that, too) and, of course, for the contrived conflict known as The War on Christmas.
You’ve no doubt heard about this conflagration. You’ve heard about it because Bill O’Reilly has made a career out of fighting it. Because Sarah Palin last year wrote a book about it. Because Glenn Beck’s website, The Blaze, has a blog devoted to nothing but examples of how there is a War on Christmas.
You know, stories of national import such as “Say Merry Christmas and Mean It: the First Amendment and Christian Traditions.” Or “Atheists Demand End to Decades-Old Christmas Tradition — but Residents and Politicians Aren’t Backing Down.” Those are headlines from The Blaze about the nefarious forces that will stop at nothing to undermine Christmas in this country, and those forces are legion.
As Palin wrote in her book, “There are many people who haven’t merely lost, misplaced, or forgotten the true meaning of Christmas, they’re trying to actively target it to destroy it, and these true Scrooges have a frightening amount of power.” As I noted a year ago, “Maybe not as frightening as a metric ton worth of empty rhetoric, but frightening in its own way, I guess.”
Yes, I just plagiarized myself. Hey, I thought it was a good line.
Anyway, a year has passed since that insightful, witty, thoughtful column, so I decided to check in and see how The War on Christmas is going. Because, apparently, there is no end to the willingness of some people to stoke imaginary fears and profit off imaginary wars. There is no end to the profiteers’ ability to ignore the fact that Americans celebrate Christmas with alarming excess. There is no end to the cultural warriors’ desire to view every “Happy Holidays” greeting and every “Holiday Tree” as an example of how secularism is destroying the Christian foundation of this country.
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