Still Life, With Cats

There is no war on Christmas.

I am stating this because it is, of course, time once again in the US for the hard-right religious nuts to start bleating about yet another way that us crazy liberals are destroying America. December’s flavor of this particular meme is, of course, the War on Christmas. What is this war, you ask? Well, it starts with the fact that some people are daring to say Happy Holidays to them instead of Merry Christmas, proving that clearly those people hate Christmas and God and little baby Jesus and blah-blah-blah. And then it continues with the Anti-Christmas police barging through their doors, forcing them to get rid of their Christmas trees and forbidding them singing carols and worshiping the way they want to, and…

Oh wait. That last part isn’t actually happening. The only thing that *is* happening is that people are saying Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas; that society as a whole is publicly recognizing that other holidays exist during the month of December and responding appropriately; that “the holidays” encompasses far more than just one religion’s celebration; and most importantly, that the world is changing and some people don’t get to keep on pretending that their world view; their version of faith is the only one out there.

The ‘War on Christmas’ has absolutely nothing to do with anyone hating Christmas, and everything to do with a small but unfortunately annoyingly vocal group of people who claim to be Christian, throwing temper tantrums because they’re being required to acknowledge that not only do other religions and cultures exist, but that they might actually *also* be celebrating holidays around the same time as theirs. The War on Christmas is code speak for ‘we liked it better when we could force everyone else to do what *we* wanted, and we didn’t have to tolerate any other opinion.’ The War on Christmas actually means ‘there are all those people out there who don’t look like us and who don’t act like us and we want them to go away.’

Or in other words, there is no war on Christmas. No war. None. Just a whole lot of sad, pathetic people clinging desperately to a past world view that only benefited them and no one else. Just a whole lot of people giving the vast majority of one of the world’s major religions a really bad name. Just a vocal minority who are too scared and narrow-minded to actually look beyond their tiny little world and see how wonderful and exciting it is to live in a country that is overflowing with diversity – that everywhere you turn there is something new to learn about a culture or a faith that you didn’t know before.

There is no War on Christmas. Never has been. Never will be. But that won’t stop the same old talking heads from pulling out the same old tired bullet points and hammering the ground where the dead horse once lay. And it won’t stop some people from listening to their every word, and then believing them.

That’s fine. Go on and believe in this mythical war if that’s what makes you happy. After all, here in the US, unlike a lot of countries in the world, everyone has the freedom to believe in anything they want to.

As for the rest of us, we’ll be out here, in the real world, enjoying the way things are changing for the better. We’ll be loving our neighbors as ourselves. We’ll be embracing the entire holiday season wholeheartedly.

And we will be pitying you.

‘Tis the season for Holidailies!