Merry Christmas v. Happy Holidays
By 
Yesterday I drove into Buena Vista, a small town in the middle of the Colorado mountains that’s pretty evenly split between Democrats and Republicans voting wise, and I noticed that a bunch of businesses had put up signs on the side of the road wishing passing drivers a merry Christmas, but that maybe a quarter of the businesses had chosen to engage in this form of civic/commerical advertising by putting up signs hat said Happy Holidays or Seasons Greetings. And this of course brought to mind all the absurd nonsense about the completely imaginary “war on Christmas,” that’s been such a prominent part of reactionary propaganda for at least the past 30 years or so, when Fox News started up and needed stories like this to cover for its central mission of enriching plutocrats even more lavishly.
And it came to pass that this morning I read an op-ed by E.J. Dionne on the subject, which itself noted that 20 years ago he debated this issue with Charles Krauthammer:
Charles was his full-throated, eloquent self. “The attempts to de-Christianize Christmas are as absurd as they are relentless,” he wrote. “To insist that the overwhelming majority of this country stifle its religious impulses in public so that minorities can feel ‘comfortable’ not only understandably enrages the majority but commits two sins.
“The first,” he explained, “is profound ungenerosity toward a majority of fellow citizens who have shown such generosity of spirit toward minority religions. The second is the sin of incomprehension — a failure to appreciate the uniqueness of the communal American religious experience.”
His final lines: “Merry Christmas. To all.”
What strikes me about this is how, even in the context of this profoundly trivial issue, the paranoid style is such an inescapable part of the reactionary cinematic universe that a little more than a decade later would find its full flowering in Trumpism.
I lived through the unspeakable horrors of “the attempts to de-Christianize Christmas,” and can testify that these never actually happened. What happened is that some people, as a matter of pure etiquette, decided in a completely informal and voluntary way to take into account the possibility that the person they were interacting with wasn’t even nominally a Christian, so it might be a very minor act of rudeness to which such people a merry Christmas. Because of the development of this — again, completely informal and voluntary — cultural practice of saying something like happy holidays or season’s greetings, or even merry Christmas to those who celebrate, lots of profit-driven enterprises decided to subtly shift their commercial practices to recognize the development of this particular piece of social etiquette (lots of others didn’t of course).
That’s it! What infuriated the MAGA crowd even before it took on that conscious identity was a wholly informal cultural practice that acknowledged, in the most non-coercive way possible, the existence of cultural difference in America. That’s what the War on Christmas has always been about, except what it has really always been is a War For Ethno-Nationalist Christian Authoritarianism. I’m tempted to put Christian in scare quotes, but that’s a no true Scotsman fallacy, because that in fact is who the self-conscious “Christians” in America are today. They are the ultimate practitioners of the identity politics they supposedly despise.