Not a War on Christmas, But

 

Many conservatives claim that American leftists are waging a war on Christmas. That is an exaggeration, but it is true that many on the left have some discomfort with the holiday. They have added “merry Christmas” to their long list of forbidden phrases and generally successfully pressured corporations into not mentioning Christmas in their ads urging people to buy their products as Christmas presents. Most replace it with “the holidays”, but some go farther. General Motors is running an ad telling people to buy a truck for the holiday, singular - a holiday which, one presumes, dares not speak its name.

The usual explanation from leftists that this is done out of some sort of sensitivity or concern for inclusion since there are other holidays people celebrate at about the same time of the year is nonsense. (To see how nonsensical, one can note that to be consistent leftists would have to stop mentioning Martin Luther King Day and speak only of the January holidays out of sensitivity toward and inclusion of the people who celebrate Elvis’s birthday or Confederate Heroes Day at the same time of the year.) Mentioning one holiday neither disparages any other left unmentioned nor implies that everyone does or should celebrate it.

Conservatives blame leftists’ hostility to Christianity, and while it surely is true that many leftists are not fond of Christianity, I think the conservatives mainly are wrong. Christmas is at least as much a secular as a religious holiday. Millions of non-Christians around the world celebrate it. Santa, Frosty, Rudolph, presents, decorated trees, open houses, office parties, and proclaiming a season to be jolly have little or nothing to do with Christianity. Easter, which is a far more nearly entirely religious holiday than Christmas, does not seem to bother the leftists much at all. My conjecture is that the leftists’ discomfort is more emotional than theological and has mainly to do with the merry part. The notion of unsupervised Americans feeling happy with life and themselves, jollily benevolent toward the people around them, and generally full of good cheer, generosity, and warmheartedness goes enough against their world view to feel wrong and even threatening to them irrespective of any opinions about Christianity.

Regardless of why the leftists do it, the phoniness of the corporate weasels who go along with it is laughable and contemptible. They count on Christmas. They want to make their numbers from people buying Christmas presents and know Christmas is what matters for them. They probably know that just about everyone else who thinks about it also knows it. Yet they cave in and pretend otherwise. It’s a minor thing compared to some of the other phoniness and hypocrisy around us, but it is bad enough to be annoying and indicative.