Column: Another holiday battle won

Talk about it

Ladies and gentlemen, elves and elvettes, assorted reindeer, I come to you with good news this week. After months of struggle and hardship and brilliantly lit lawn displays, we have won yet another demanding battle in the increasingly difficult war on Christmas.

Hold your glittering ornaments high and drink deeply of your egg nog, my friends, because last weekend people across the country gathered to celebrate family and giving and everything the opportunity to secretly return the ugly sweater you got from the aunt you never see.

Millions of revelers sat down together and ate big meals. They gave each other gifts. Maybe gave time or money to charity. And they did it in spite of a culture that would like nothing better than to homogenize the Christmas season like a dairy homogenizes milk. Only without quite so many cows.

How else can you explain the lack of Merry Christmas signs in stores otherwise bursting at the poorly-taped gift-wrap seams with artificial trees, tacky elf decorations and brightly colored lights? A business decision to avoid alienating a sizable portion of their customer base? Since when is Christmas about business? How sad would it make Black Friday shoppers, sacrificing their time, their sanity and perhaps their eyesight to hear a claim like that?

What other reason could there be for governments that erect holiday trees rather than Christmas displays? Next you’ll tell me governments consider the opinions of all residents in their other decisions, too.

As a friend pointed out on Facebook a few weeks ago, the next logical step in this fight can only be the removal of Santa Claus from our nation’s malls. And if you take Santa out of Christmas, what else is there to celebrate?

This isn’t the end, of course. Not even close. Making it through one year simply means we’ve got another 12 months to save our energy and strategize. It’s not enough just to celebrate Christmas. We have to do it in a way that makes it impossible for anyone to ignore. We can’t just decorate our lawns, we need decorations that are visible from space. Nativity scenes are nice, but let’s stand them next to glowing plastic carolers and Santa Clauses and the inflatable M&Ms that were so vital in the story of the first Christmas.

If they’re set to music, then so much the better. And maybe we could use lasers.

We need to say Merry Christmas to everyone we interact with, and we need to do it with an undercurrent of hostility that makes them know how wrong they are if they celebrate something other than the season’s only true holiday. Because they are. They’re as wrong as a Kardashian wedding.

We live in a country built by people from around the world. They have brought with them a colorful collection of holidays, each with their own traditions. But Christmas isn’t about inclusion. It’s about presents and fruitcake and midnight mass. It’s about … actually, I’m not really clear on what it’s about. I haven’t been to church in a while.

People who don’t celebrate Christmas can have their holidays. They can have their Hannukahs and Kwanzas and, I don’t know, their druid tree festivals. All we ask is that they don’t talk about them.

That’s the way wars are won.

Tags: opinion, commentaries, farmington