Holiday Baby

But I’d like to just offer some thoughts on the War on Christmas. Most liberals are now saying “Hey, hey hey! We didn’t declare war on Christmas.”

Here however is the wonderful Andrew Cunningham

This BBC story about the fading English tradition of the nativity play caught my eye. Actually, England might be a bit behind the curve if their authorities are trying to deracinate their children by going to the trouble of entirely banning Christmas. This side of the Atlantic, the preferred tactic is to submerge the holiday in a sea of allegedly analogous festivals of other cultures. A friend was telling me that her kid's class has to celebrate the "season of festivals" by "doing presentations" such vital December traditions as a Korean Doll Festival (the one her unlucky son had drawn from the gender-neutral hat)...in addition, no doubt, to Hanukkah, Kwanza, etc. etc. and, somewhere down the list, the quaint story of a boy born in Bethlehem. So Christmas is not "banned" at all--how could anyone say that? Au contraire, my hysterical rightwing friends your Yule holiday is still very much in the picture, in much the same sense that "Where's Waldo" is. – I,Ectomorph

Exactly. There have been other developments that have raised the consciousness of Christians regarding their situation vis-à-vis their elite masters. Fifty years ago no Christian would have taken offense to “Happy Holidays”. Now that many Christians do is not, as our shocked liberals believe, a vicious political radicalism infecting the right-wing wackos – rather is it that the meaning of “Happy Holidays” has changed. It still does mean “Happy Holidays” but it has been, through the mandates of retail employers, ad campaigns, and general cultural ubiquity come to be the approved, sanitized, politically correct thing to say. Two years ago one of my fellow retail clerks, a Christian by baptism, was offended by my using the word “Christmas” freely with customers. This my friends is not sensitivity - it is a ghetto mentality. Now that the word “Holiday” has been taken to include Kwanza and Hanukkah and New Year’s – it is starting to strike at Christian symbols – we have “Holiday Trees” and “traditional holiday stockings”. You know, like Jews have “Holiday candle-holders.”

There is also the increasing elite consensus that religion is entirely a personal and a private thing – a notion totally at odds with nearly every religious tradition. This consensus leads to a feeling among those who share elite sentiments that explicitly religious themes, ideas and images in the marketplace are somehow shameful or offensive. This mood trickles down and otherwise sane people begin self-censoring.

So liberals are shocked, shocked, shocked that we accuse them of making war on Christmas. Then after they express their dismay at being falsely accused they go on to condescendingly explain to us that the Puritans banned Christmas, as John Stewart did tonight, and Ron Reagan did earlier on MSNBC. The Puritans banned Christmas because they were following their religious faith and imposing their beliefs on the community – not because they held that Korean doll festivals were co-equal with the Lord’s birth. Then they explain to us that Christmas is really a pagan holiday because Christmas trees aren’t in the Bible. I suppose because there are democratic institutions in Washington D.C. (which was just a swamp at our Founding)– the government in the Beltway isn’t really the government of the United States- it’s the government of the Roman Republic. We liberals don’t hate Christmas, we just hate you. We’re not insulting your traditions we are just saying that you have a right to celebrate that totally idiotic, misguided, half-pagan ritual honoring your hateful God.

Tom Piatak, Salon and Andy in the References.