Remember when certain people freaked out because the White House cards just weren't Christmasy enough?
Merry War on the War on Christmas season, everybody. How has your War on the War on Christmas been? Jolly? I hope so, because let's face it: Out there in wider America, the War on the War on Christmas
isn't doing so well.
[2005] was the apex of the so-called War On Christmas -- the politi-cultural, made-for-cable-news back-and-forth that commences every holiday season, including the current one. The best 2013 has come up with so far is a book by former half-term Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and the declaration by Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee (D) that the ceremonial tree in the State House would be a "Christmas Tree."
That the "war" has de-escalated so much since that 2005 vote suggests the political culture has more or less moved on.
Well that's a depressing thought. The biggest danger in the War on the War on Christmas is that the participants would eventually get bored. You'd begin to lose your John Gibsons (remember him?), your Bill O'Reillys (oh right, I think he still has a show); sure, you'd have a collection of foot draggers maybe showing up near the end, people who were never really known for having their sweaty fingers on the pulse of America, putting out a straggling book or two in a vain attempt to capture the glory of those earlier War on the War on Christmases, but eventually most people would move on to better and more important things like emphasizing the raw patriotism of being able to make your employees work on Thanksgiving Day, or stamp collecting.
The danger, of course, is that now people may be saying Happy Holidays in our retail stores without being stoned by customers primed by their television sets to be offended by anything less Christmasy than Jesus wearing a crown of mistletoe. We wouldn't even know. We may be overly commercializing Christmas now and—no, wait, that one was good either way. We may be unduly convincing people to be happy during the holiday season instead of remembering what it's all about—declaring one's own religion to be the One True Religion, and making sure nobody else can celebrate the winter holiday season unless they do it in the precise way a loose collection of second-tier pundits want them to.
Does that mean the War on Christmas, which for you kids out there is most definitely white, won? No, Virginia. We would have known if it had won (for starters, the polar ice cap would be melting under Santa's feet.) But the War on the War on Christmas, which for you kids out there is even more white, as white as a white guy wearing a white coat in a winter snowbank while Fox News interviews him about what it's like to be so white, appears to itself be the sicker of the two. It may not have many years left; we should cherish these memories, so that we can tell our grandchildren what it was like back when the War on the War on Christmas was one of our most celebrated holiday seasons.