There is not much good news of late, but there is at least one development, as we slide slickly into 2020, we can be thankful for: the end, at long last, of the War on Christmas.
Those of you three years of age or younger would not know this, but for many years there was a War on America's most celebrated national holiday. The war began roughly around the same time Fox News was launched, for some reason, and was almost exclusively fought on that particular channel, for some other reason. But the gist of it is this: Prior to the year 2017, nobody was allowed to say Merry Christmas. If you did say Merry Christmas, roving gangs of the other—possibly human, possibly animal, possibly mineral-based, and/or possibly from that exoplanet recently discovered where it rains diamonds onto plains of diamonds as diamond waves crash on the shores of diamond beaches—might possibly burst into your house and beat you with well-cured German sausages. There was never quite a documented case of this, to be clear, but it was well understood nonetheless: Americans, by which we mean White Americans Of A Certain Demographic, were under the constant threat of being beaten with deli products unless they said Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas, and this was an crisis that unfolded every October but was returned, like bad clothing, every December 26 or so.
Nobody was quite sure why. It had something to do with socialism, and was being forced on America by unseen forces variously described as politically correct or coastal elites or just globalists. It was those attackers that put Happy Holidays signs in store windows, not board rooms or ad agencies or the Winter Spirit of Maximal Sales, but what was certain is that it was an "attack on Christianity" by forces who, you know, were not Christian. Or were the wrong kind of Christian. Or were the right kind of Christian, but were still going to hell anyway, for the same reason Jesus aims hurricanes at some towns but not others, and then the reverse, and then both or neither because you all know what you did.
But it's done now. Over. It ended as mysteriously as it started. You are now allowed to say Merry Christmas if you want to and you can be almost one hundred percent sure you will not be beaten with sausages by aliens from the diamond planet. Give it a try: Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas. Say it into your bathroom mirror, in the dark, holding a flashlight to your face. See? No aliens. Whatever curse was once put on your trembling tongue has been lifted; you need no longer fear the Holiday Wars. You did not do that, even once, in the old days, and for that reason you cannot discount the possibility that it might once have resulted in sausage-violence.
We do not know what made the difference. There are some possibilities.
The War on Christmas was at its peak in the years immediately after a non-white president was elected. It was declared over, literally, the moment a white man retook the post. What this means is unclear and mysterious.
Could it be that the War on Christmas is actually an offshoot of the tea party movement, the anti-tax, anti-deficit furor that similarly leapt into being via Fox News personalities in the months after the first non-white president was elected—only to vanish afterward? Perhaps the two, tax avoidance and deep but very very specific spiritual beliefs, are connected somehow? Again, inconclusive.
Is it possible that the other holidays no longer exist, the ones Americans once referenced only when held at gun—no, meatpoint? Hanukkah may have disappeared when we were not looking? No, it is right there: Even the White House celebration took place as usual, although with a touch more weird than normal. New Years Day, though—now that is less clear. It has not yet happened. It is possible that we will pass Christmas Day only to find that December somehow never ends, and the next year never begins. Will there be a December 32? A December 54? If the next year never comes, then neither would its elections: What if the whole notion of "2020" was an invention of CrowdStrike, working in hand with Democrats, as a plot against Fox News Christians? We cannot be certain.
In the end, though, we must acknowledge that one particular man claims to be responsible for ending the War on Christmas, and all of the cultural guardians who identified the previously unknown danger to Christmas in the first place have emphatically agreed. It may be that the only champion Christmas needed, to stay relevant in our topsy-turvy America, was a shithead.
Not just any shithead, but one that could reign supreme: a Chosen One from among all the nation's shitheads, one that encapsulated all of the worst qualities of all the nation's worst people. A tax-evader. A rapist. A racist. A friend of child sex traffickers, and a business ally to international crime. A boor, a liar, a petty cheat, a defrauder of charities, of students, of condominium-buyers, of golfers and more. Only by the powers of all these pustules of humanity combined could the nation’s true Christmas savior be formed, the consummate crap-pile among crap-piles.
It was he that the Christmas-protectors were waiting for. It was not kindness that would save the birth of Christ from the encroaching mistletoe of obscurity, but instead sin, and belittlement, and lavish greed. The holiday lights, once dimmed by consumerism and multi-cultural angst, shine bright again, sprayed clean in a shower of gold. It was this that Christmas needed, and this that would fill every stocking: malevolence. Honest, chin-forward malevolence, of the highest national sort.
The children in the desert tent cities are being told Merry Christmas again, and they are being told it in American English and no other language, since none of those other Christmases exist. The hungry are being told Merry Christmas again, as their food assistance expires, and learning the true meaning of of the season in the manner now properly prescribed for them. There is a new bonesaw in every stocking; a new slander hangs from every tree. It was this that made the difference, and gave the audiences of Carlson, of Hannity, of Pirro and the others new spirit, and new hope, as they saw a once-decaying America born anew in their own image, in the flickering light of the television screens.
They say that Jesus can be found in a good man's heart and on an evil man's lips. But this man is something new; to this one, Jesus can be found on a fake magazine cover hanging on a golden yellow wall. It can be moved; it can be sold. It can be put in a store window, where the Happy Holidays banner once hung, to signal the end to a war that began and ended between commercial breaks of a show neither you nor I ever saw. You can buy it, if you like. You can hang it from your tree, and reflect.