Merry Christmas, You Bastards
It’s an interesting proposition, one raised, as Miranda Devine rightly claims, year after year, that Christmas is under attack. Oh-my-God. What will we do? Sadly, what we hear more about these days isn’t the same as what the Christians used to ask, that we “keep Christ in Christmas,” but instead it’s a kind of Wahhibist hue and cry for Christmas to be celebrated in full force by everyone. No secular society here. Instead, some chicken sandwich shop doesn’t want to put up a nativity scene, and they’re anti-Christian. The city spends hundreds of thousands of dollars more on decorations around town and they’re not enough, they’re “grim.” While there are a number of people of conservative political mindsets who claim it’s non-Christians making it hard on the “rest of us,” in fact, the claim that secular forces are conspiring to disallow religious celebrations in public is equally a myth, and it make me angry to have these fundamentalist mental cases throwing this in my face every year. Growing up, I witnessed a move from civic decorations devoted to fir trees, Santa Claus, and reindeer to efforts inclusive of other religious festivals of the season, with menorahs and Davidic stars mixed in among the other tinselled streetlamp wraps and banners. There were always pretty lights and colorful placards and so forth, and it was very pleasant. And since those days, nothing’s changed – nothing, except that lately, since the 1980’s, I’d say, there has been a growing discontent among conservatives over their depth of control. I’ve lately spent some time re-reading literature from the 1930’s and ‘40’s, and it’s very plain to see that conservatism used to feel it encompassed morality and then lost its grip over the course of the two World Wars. Although the 1950’s saw the fist clutch more tightly, the pressure exerted only caused what it tried to hold onto to squeeze out explosively during the 1960’s and ‘70’s, and the fragmentation that occurred has only recently moved to reassemble social order, albeit in a new inclusive fashion than previously. For the last twenty years, however, that fist is closing again, and the pundits of conservatism, such as Miranda Devine, Rush Limbaugh, Fred Nile, Jerry Falwell, have risen to decry the lack of morality in public, and they choose to do this by “astroturfing” the FCC with indecency complaints, using the media to cavil against chicko-shops and an insufficiency of Christmas cheeriness at Town Hall. This serves to raise the ire of small-minded people, who then proceed to support the broader agenda at work. But look, it’s not as bad as they’re making out. There’s tinsel everywhere, tacky, yes, but present up and down the main streets of suburb and city. The shopping malls and storefronts have their fake snow and plastic evergreens. There’s no lack of Salvos begging spare change, Santas in “North Pole” villages for your annual photo distribution to the rellies. At least one house in each town is decorated with enough lights and Frosty Snowmen to see its quarterly energy bill exceed its mortgage repayment by an order of magnitude, and the traffic will be abysmal with everyone driving by to see it. There are even little stables with Wise Men and Christ Childs overlooked by 60-watt angels. The non-Christians are not unhappy the Christians make a point of Christmas, and the secularists only bemoan the shabbiness of the decorations’ quality. (Fairy lights and tinsel and bauble-hung pines look a bit dismal in these southern climes, and it doesn’t help to substitute palms or eucalypts.) So maybe it isn’t Christmas that’s under siege. Maybe it’s just the pressure of all those gifts you’re going to have to get, the hot weather, and the sense of enforced cheer. Maybe if you celebrated Christmas itself, you could stop picking on everyone else who isn’t doing it to your standard. Just a suggestion.