The Fake War on X-Mas

It's that time of year again.  

The time of jingle-bells, fat guys in red suits and constant Bing Crosby songs piped through the speaker systems of every store that you're liable to walk into.  The weird thing is that according to many retailers, the X-Mas season began nearly 4 months ago.  

It seems that every year, X-Mas creeps further and further backward on the calendar, like a Black Hole sucking in everything in its path.  Chanukah, the relatively-minor Jewish celebration of an ancient, successful uprising against the Greek Empire, has, I suppose in competition and/or over-compensation, morphed from being a few nights of singing songs, lighting candles and ritually gambling tiny sums of money to a bizarro mirror image of X-Mas, including ever-increasing amounts of presents and Chanuk-ized versions of X-Mas paraphernalia.  Thanksgiving, once a national holiday in its own right, has for the past few decades become nothing more than the day before opening day of the official holiday shopping season, Black Friday, the day that retailers dream of every year as their last hope of getting out of the red and into a healthy profit.  Hell, I've even heard X-Mas music piped in during Halloween Sales and have seen X-Mas commercials on TV as early as Labor Day.  Corporate America should be commended for their ingenuity in creating such an ingrained, almost Pavlovian means of getting nearly everybody in the country to buy expensive somethings for everybody they know all at once.  It's a great con, and it's been working well enough to base an entire retail economy around.

Now, I've never celebrated the holiday of X-Mas myself.  Nor have I any personal desire to. Growing up a Jewish kid and having to explain that fact again and again to total strangers in response to the question of "and what's Santa bringing YOU...?" and being looked at as if I'd just said something criminal hammered home to me at a very young age the harshness of having an entire culture dismiss me as "other" at every turn.  To me, X-Mas is -- at best -- a birthday party for some stranger I don't know and will likely never meet.  As such I tend to boycott the economic side of it every year.  I tell all my friends and family to refrain from buying me anything, because I'm certainly not buying anything for them.  

That said, I don't begrudge other people the right to privately celebrate with friends and loved ones any holiday they connect to.  If people want X-Mas trees. Menorahs, Wiccan bonfires or a blow-up Flying Spaghetti Monster effigy in the privacy of their own homes (or outside, in the case of the bonfires), I have absolutely no objections.  My objection is to the constant bombardment of insistence that I MUST celebrate it too in public.  

Which brings me to the so-called "War on X-Mas".  There's been a massive Regressive push in the past few years against all cultural reflections of our multi-ethnic, multi-denominational heterogenous society and to cement once and for all X-Mas as the only winter holiday anybody can ever celebrate.  

Christian Regressive objections to having to take the possibility of non-Christians in their midst into account, even down to saying "Happy Holidays" in public instead of "Merry X-Mas" shows once again the subtle, often-unacknowledged Dominionist side of American Christian Regressives.  "Peace on earth & goodwill towards men" has turned into "Bend over while I shove some X-Mas where the sun don't shine".  As I examined in a previous post, this has all the hallmarks of everything the Regressives champion:  Greed, bigotry, the glorification of bullying and an aggressive theocratic desire to publicly dominate everybody else's private life.

But, in their zealous attempt to legitimize their desire for an American Theocracy, Christian Regressives miss the Black Hole Effect that X-Mas already has.  It has grown exponentially from the 12 days it once was into the massive 4-month juggernaut I've just described.  If there is a "War on X-Mas", X-Mas is winning.