The War on Christmas
Dec 04, 2012 by UghEven though there's no actual war, there really ought to be. I mean, I'm at the coffee shop and... Christmas music. I'm walking through my office and... Christmas music. The damn office building foyer has a Christmas tree and presents.
In recent years I've noticed major retailers (*cough* Target *cough*) actually taking down their Halloween displays before Halloween, in order to get a leg up on Christmas. Halloween represented the last known barrier to a year-round Christmas retail orgy, and it seems to be failing!
Feh. I like Christmas and all (although it's a Hanukkah year at our house in 2012), but holy flipping Jesus enough already!
Comments
Dec 05, 2012, 01:34:33 John Thullen wrote:
Jon Stewart opened his show last night with a lament about how the War on Christmas just ain't what it used to be.
It seems to be losing its traditional trappings, the War that is.
He observed that Christmas, despite the decades-long war by the secular left, is eating all of the other holidays. Too bad about Thanksgiving now that it is Black Thursday, not to be confused with Good Friday and Black Friday, which if you think about it, is confusing in and of itself since one is the day Jesus gets crucified and the other is the day Jesus gets an elbow in the ribs stampeding into a Wal Mart for the DVD bargains with all of the other thieves and martyrs, or something.
Watch out, Halloween, he hollered.
I would add that Xmas seems to expand its settlements willynilly in the other holidays' territory and persist in developing nuclear weapons despite all threats and entreaties from the more humble holidays.
Even the Easter Bunny is feeling the competitive heat, as if birth should out-rate resurrection.
I like Christmas.
But it's becoming a bully and a menace to the rest of the year.
An absurdity, like global warming and big honking automatic weapons and the terrible threat of raising the high marginal tax rate to 39.5%, as George W. Bush and Congress wrote into law.
Sorry, no can do nuttin about it.
Maybe when Christmas starts muscling in on the 4th of July, the right people will do something about it.
Until then, as Mitt Romney might be caught saying on tape for Sheldon Adelson, for the 47% every day is Christmas in America.
I'd ask for some stupid ion my stocking this year, but the year has already been so bountiful in stupidity that I already feel like a man who has everything.
Dec 05, 2012, 05:41:15 nous wrote:
Methinks the WoC types don't mean actual war and mean something more like Invasion of the Holiday Snatchers. It's not that ChristJesusIsLordMass is being killed, it's that it is being colonized by Ethnic Alien Communist Secularists from Outer Space while all True ChristJesusIsLordMass Patriots are censored and marginalized.
I suppose we could also call it The Browning of Christmas, since it relies on the same underlying sense of lost cultural predominance.
Dec 06, 2012, 21:41:46 Slartibartfast wrote:
My two cents:
Christmas the event has got nothing to do with sales, christmas trees, nativity scenes, stockings, ornaments, nonstop Christmas music, etc.
But just try telling my wife that.
I'd just as soon get nothing, and give some gifts to those less fortunate. Which we are doing anyway, but more of that kind of thing.
Dec 14, 2012, 07:56:48 russell wrote:
I attend a church that was first gathered in 1629 by a bunch of cranky Puritans.
They didn't want anything to do with Christmas, they thought it was a noxious Papist holiday, full of vain frippery and superstitious mumbo-jumbo.
Now we do the whole nine yards, including rum punch after the Christmas Eve service.
I feel like we're swimming against the tide, somehow.
Dec 16, 2012, 06:32:07 sapient wrote:
Rachel N. Schnepper, practically a neighbor of mine in Lexington, Virginia, apparently read russell's post, and wrote something in the NYT about it: http://www.nytimes.com/2012...
Dec 16, 2012, 09:06:04 John Thullen wrote:
I've been known to attack the idea of the designated hitter in baseball with puritanical zeal.
Brett Bellmore and me: two Puritans on opposite ends of the gun control seesaw.
Erick Notlincolnson thinks he's the direct political descendant of Abraham Lincoln.
I'm a dirty hippie Democrat and so was Robert E. Lee and slave owner Colonel Fripius T. Scotsman.
As a dirty hippie, I flirted like a libertine long ago with "health foods" before they became mainstream, until it occurred to me that the owner family and clerks at the local health food hut (now, amazingly, a publicly-traded company on the exchange) were pale, sallow wraiths haunting the aisles like macrobiotic Jacob Marleys, vaguely walleyed from some missing ingredient in their meatless supplemented world, and humorless to boot -- Puritans for their soy-based Gods.
A cheeseburger was Christmas after that.
We need a periodic Jubilee to forgive all labels and word meanings encrusting the world through time.
Coinage rubbed smooth and meaningless from overuse.
A new language every two generations or so
The only word we may reuse that fits everyone is hypocrite.
Lock up those guns, take off your pants, and pass the rum.
Dec 16, 2012, 10:03:18 John Thullen wrote:
Howdy, Pilgrim.
http://andrewsullivan.theda...