Christmas' War on Me

It's the holiday season and, according to the FoxnewsHacks and several religious organizations set-up primarily to complain about the secularization of America, we are ballsdeep in the diabolical War on Christmas. Yes, poor Christianish consumers all over America must suffer the heathenistic indignity of being told to have a "happy holiday" when all they really want is a white merry Christmas. Wal-Mart, that well-known bastion of atheistic liberalism, has started using the unpolitically-correct happy holiday greeting under the auspices of being more inclusive of non-Christian freaks, but in reality, so we are told by the pro-Christmas warriors, to piss off its largely Christian consumer base, thereby dramatically decreasing sales of Toby Keith's new holiday CD "All God wants for Christmas is the USA to stick a Patriot missile up some Iraqi ass." Toby is reportedly reeling.

But as much as I like to see people pissed off at Wal-Mart, anyone's who actually living in America today knows that this "War on Christmas" shtick is a chimera. You cannot walk ten feet in any city in the country without tripping over a tackily be-Noeled Christmas tree (which many people seem to cluelessly think was a Christian notion) or being harassed by a Cosby-sweatered, caroling God Squad neurotically obsessed with kitschy songs about the birth of the baby Jesus. Just the other day, I attended a work Christmas tree trimming party where I had to listen to eight of my co-workers sing in various disjunctive tonalities about the little town of Bethlehem, with little or no recognition that I didn't give a shit about said small town. And this is in San Francisco, where we purportedly burn Christians at the stake.

Since Bill O'Reilly and his brethren have been spewing their misguided vitriol all over their seedy airwaves about this non-event of moral decadence, the rational press has defensively chimed in a bit trying to calm everyone down, lest we create a fight out of nothing. Sadly though, what so few seem to be saying is that maybe the few minor changes that are occurring may be a good thing. Apparently it's just me, but when mega-international-corporations begin using happy holidays as opposed to Merry Christmas (even if they are doing it for the wrong reasons), I see it as progress. When a high school in some backwards wasteland in Texas decides to rename the "Christmas break" the "winter break" in reluctant recognition of the fact that not every kid at the school is going to be using his free time to celebrate the ostensible birth of a regurgitated messiah figure, it brings a little holiday joy in to my life. By the way, and I hate to have to point this out since I know both of my readers are well aware of it, the origin of the celebration of Christmas around the winter solstice is of course due to a number of factors, the least of which is the notion that Christ was actually born that day, but rather more likely to coalesce the upstart religion with then-existing popular pagan celebrations, such as the Feast of Saturnalia, the glorification of Mithra and several others. Christianity needed to appeal to the sensibilities of pre-existing crappy religions, which is all well and good for it, but Christians do not now get to pretend they invented the celebration.

The real problem is that it is so goddamn politically incorrect to be for anything that can ever be portrayed as a reaction to political correctness. Of course, the world of media hackistry knows this all too well. The discomforting notion that any of us are so pathetically weak as to succumb to the pressure of whiny, yet somehow shadowy, special interests groups shames us into doing just that at the whim of anyone sly enough to wield this great ironical sword. Thus self-conscience doth make cowards of us all. They excoriate anyone who would dare suggest that Christmas and all its ludicrous trappings should be a private annoyance for those masochistic enough to care about it, rather than a public one for the rest of us that do not. They scour the country to find anecdotal evidence of the evil conspiracy to rid our beloved nation of its traditional Judeo-Christian pseudo-moralistic roots - a task made significantly easier in these modern times of internet blogs and email. What they cannot find, they invent. Next, they run a poll asking people whether they are for or against murder and thereby conclude that 85% of our citizens are bible-thumping Christians. They pepper the results with some antiquated quotes from a few of our more spiritually-feeble founding fathers (Tom Paine ever excluded), wrap it all up in a total lack of historical contextualization and work themselves into a veritable lather of traditionalist indignation.

Of course, a few high school principals excluding religious symbols from their schools does not a conspiracy make. It's pure meaningless sensationalism, like shark attacks and white girl kidnappings. But it is par for the coarse and gives the dyspeptic amongst us something to bitch about. The idea that a rash of destructive hurricanes have some relation to global warming is seen as non-sensical, liberal propaganda, while the idea that they are the indirect result of God's intemperance with a perceived rise in moral relativism and gay rights is debatable. This is the frustrating Christian America in which I must live.

Unfortunately, the war is not on Christmas, Christmas is at war with us, or in particular me, and it has been my whole life, tormenting me since my decidedly less relevant birth. As I small child I was bribed into enjoying it with the elated thoughts of three-packs of unsoiled underwear and Changeformers - black-market, generic-brand Transformers for kids with mean-spirited, unloving parents. In school, I was coerced into accepting it as a well-needed break from the monotony of getting the shit kicked out of me by church kids who needed to misplace anger they had at their creepy, overly handsy Church-group leaders. In college, I tolerated it merely for the tastiness of spiked Eggnog cocktails and the far too unlikely prospect of cavorting with co-eds in skimpy Santa outfits, only to maintain my Mary-like virginity in some sort of sick cosmo-teleological joke. (Which brings up a very important question I have long had since I got drunk and passed out at dirty Rita's house: if the holy spirit can impregnate Mary, can he give me the clap? Immaculate transmission perhaps? No, damn that dirty Rita). As an adult, I have absolutely no patience for any of it, and I think it's high time we dropped the whole God-forsaken production and grow up a bit. No more spruce trees, no more non-hot-female Santas, no more wreaths, no more gift exchanges, no more inane caroling, no more shitty X-mas movies perpetuating the talent-illusion that is Tim Allen and, most importantly, no more ham-handed nativity scenes. I say wipe it all away and send it back to the middle ages where it rightfully belongs.

In fact, in this post-9/11, post-Katrina world we live in, I fear a simple war on Christmas may be narrow-minded, utopist, naivete. What we need is a war on religion, nay, even better, a war on God. It's going to be a long road and it won't be easy, but such is the cost of liberty and righteousness. I want God off my dollar bill, taken back out of the Pledge of Allegiance, stripped from the constitution, chiseled from of our monuments, thrown off the television and erased from our collective consciousness. But that's just me, I understand many others don't believe what I do, which I suppose is fine for them if not for their souls.