Tim F was right: the War on Christmas has become unwinnable quagmire. This Sarah Palin TWOC soundboard is quite amusing, but she’s phoning it in.
If conservatives are serious about this war, they’re going to have make some serious strategic changes. They need a catchy Lee Greenwood war-on-Christmas song. They need to start singing this song or reciting some war on Christmas type manifesto at various public gatherings, the way they do with the Pledge Of Allegiance. Finally, and they must have known this for years, atheists don’t make for good scapegoats. There just isn’t enough history there. Atheists didn’t kill Jesus or institute Sharia law throughout the suburbs of Detroit. Make it about the Muslims and the Jews and maybe even the Hindus and you’ll see better results.
schrodingers's cat
What war on Christmas? Didn’t Christmas win a long time ago?
schrodinger's cat
What war on Christmas? Didn’t Christmas win a long time ago?
Belafon
KMarts, wherever they are, will be open at six am. If that isn’t an assault on Christmas then nothing is.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
@Belafon: That’s the secular joos front of the war on Christmas.
Amir Khalid
@schrodinger’s cat:
Yes it did; and it defeated the God-botherers of the day, who sought to suppress it as a frivolous celebration.
Jewish Steel
An angry atheist with a lawyer is one of the most powerful persons (sic) in America.
22over7
They’ve started playing Xmas music at the grocery store. Makes me want to start a war on somebody’s ass, that’s for sure.
This morning, they mixed it up with some 70’s pop. So Xmas music and muskrat love in the same trip. If I had a rocket launcher…
Bubblegum Tate
As a studio nerd, I pity the poor recording engineer who had to sit there and listen to Palin read for hours on end (and probably help her sound out the bigger words). I bet after that, he was begging to work on some shitty rock band’s demo.
John Weiss
WTF do you have something with Hindus? They, with out a doubt, have the best stories about their Gods and their pantheon even includes Jeebus. Talk about a catholic religion! The Catholics have nothing on them. Ahem. I’m proud to be a lapsed Hindu.
Gindy51
Don’t these WOC people understand the powers that be want Xmas to be more secular? If it’s all just praying and singing and hand holding, who is going to be shopping for all the shit in the Walmart’s to Macy’s stores? Talk about pissing in the shoes of the people who fund your radio programs and super PACs. Sheesh.
MomSense
What is up with conservative Republicans and their constant feelings of victimization? Isn’t this what they accused (projected) liberals of doing for years?
Jewish Steel
@Bubblegum Tate: I can hear her struggling to suppress her backwoods Northern accent. That’s irritating too.
MikeJ
@22over7:
A week or two into October Fred Meyers had two rows of xmas next to the three rows of Halloween stuff.
SteveM
They need a catchy Lee Greenwood war-on-Christmas song.
Well, there was a war-on-Christmas song by Toby Keith back in 2008, though that was for a Stephen Colbert charity record.
And there was this, which had lots of YouTube views, though I’d never heard of it until now.
Cassidy
I have to work Christmas. Shift starts at 0730.
Higgs Boson's Mate (Crystal Set)
The WOC is, along with “Same sex marriage undermines hetersexual marriage,” another of the Prime Conservative Canards and a goldmine for conservative grifters. Both will continue to be a hot topic on the right as long as con artists like Palin need to get their set their followers’ mullets on fire in order to harvest more of that sweet lucre.
Chris
Isn’t it a war on Christmas that they’re talking about this in Thanksgiving season?
dr. bloor
How about “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” between quarters of all NBA games?
schrodinger's cat
@Amir Khalid: I love frivolous celebrations, more frivolous the better. God botherers on the other hand, are chronic whiners they can never have fun and hate if any one else is having fun either.
Higgs Boson's Mate (Crystal Set)
@22over7:
If Christmas songs were actually good music they’d play them all year long, wouldn’t they?
Citizen_X
Hey! It’s not War on Christmas season yet!
For myself, I’m going to start a KEEP YULETIDE PAGAN! movement. Odin is the reason for the season!
James E Powell
I would be down with a real war on Christmas. It’s my least favorite holiday.
gbear
Can I switch over to the war on marriage for a moment? The Hawaii legislature passed a same-sex marriage bill yesterday (which now has to go back to the senate to iron out differences with the bill they already passed. The governor is enthusiastically waiting to sign it). One of the votes against allowing same-sex marriage came from an out lesbian legislator named Jo Jordan. She becomes the first openly GLBT legislator to vote against equal rights for herself. How self-hating do you have to be to do that? Here’s part of her justification (warning: the post starts out with a long christianist wingnut quote praising Jordan):
This woman is beyond clueless and she’s not afraid to admit it.
geg6
As if. Personally, I’d love a war on Christmas. It’s the holiday I most hate. Only Halloween comes close on my list of most hated holidays. Sadly, no one else seems to detest it with the white hot hate I have and nobody will get my back in this war, so I just take time off work and hibernate through it.
geg6
@James E Powell:
Ha! Great minds and all that.
gbear
@Higgs Boson’s Mate (Crystal Set): Just flip around the radio dial until you find a ‘contemporary christian’ station. It’s christmas all year long but the songs are tons worse than christmas carols.
ruemara
I used to adore Christmas. I’d spend time making things, planning christmas dinner for household and baking things to donate to the local shelter, plus items for anyone in need. I haven’t been able to do that for a few years now. I hate Christmas, Thanksgiving and all family holidays now. If these assholes were really fighting to preserve Christmas, they’d be protesting stores opening on CHRISTMAS FUCKING DAY. The more my life feels like a holding pattern before suicide, the more I detest conservatives.
geg6
@gbear:
Jeebus. Not the brightest bulb in the box there. That’s some word salad worthy of Caribou Barbie.
Gex
If we don’t wage war on Christmas, it will eat up the entire calendar.
Baud
I like Christmas, just like I like every other reason not to have to go to work.
Higgs Boson's Mate (Crystal Set)
@James E Powell:
I’m not into any holiday. To me, making one specific day the one on which we celebrate love, or gratitude, or family, or anything else, makes it easier to not celebrate them, however modestly, on all of the other days.
Frankensteinbeck
First, you may not see atheists as a believable enemy, and everyone but the fundies may go ‘huh?’ at this, but I assure you, the fundies see this as an existential threat. Their religion has been shrinking for decades. Their children abandon their vile, hateful, repressive creed in droves. In their eyes, there is a war on their religion, and the atheists are winning.
Also, all other religions and anyone expressing tolerance is an atheist. The Other is a monolithic block, especially since ‘faith’ = ‘Christianity’. Since their religion is right, how can there be other religions?
Oh, and one more detail – how long ago was it that Christmas was hated and reviled as a Papist plot?
Higgs Boson's Mate (Crystal Set)
@gbear:
It would take a court order and a team of horses to get me to do that thing.
eric
Christmas is the best holiday by far….that is when we get to be thankful for the birth of a progressive, revolutionary jewish boy. I say, more Pete Seeger at Home Depot — just not “If I had a Hammer.”
Botsplainer
@SteveM:
That makes me want to find one of those living crèche things that wingnut churches love so much just so I can spray gas on it (and the participants) before tossing in a road flare.
Jewish Steel
Am I the only commenter here who likes Christmas? The irony!
jayjaybear
I think if we gear up on R&D for the tannen-bombs and close that missile-toe gap, we can bring this whole birthday party to an end…
gbear
@Jewish Steel: I liked christmas a lot more when it didn’t start in october.
SiubhanDuinne
I scrolled through the comments on this thread, then popped over to Facebook. Believe it or not, the very first post on my feed was someone saying she had finished addressing all her Christmas cards and was about to start decorating the house.
On the fucking ninth of November.
Jewish Steel
@gbear: My birthday is around xmas. I think I was conditioned from an early age to feel positive about an approaching present dump.
Botsplainer
@Jewish Steel:
Christmas has terrorized me for years. My dad is insane about it in an unhealthy way. He over shops and over buys, and from when I was a kid took offense when other people didn’t spend insane amounts of money on stupid and useless gifts like he did.
My view is very similar to that of American treasure Samuel Clemens:
maya
Doesn’t the best example of the WOC happen when Republican House members pass out lumps of coal (provided by Koch Industries) to sepia toned children in the ongoing Immigration Reform debates?
Omnes Omnibus
@Jewish Steel: I like Christmas. Then again, my family’s Christmas celebrations are almost entirely secular. And “Happy holidays” is the best best greeting for the season – even if you are wildly Christian. “Happy holidays” manages to include wishing someone a merry Christmas and a happy new year all in one go. More efficient, no?
JordanRules
I loved Christmas as a kid for all the kid reasons, then I was pretty meh on it for quite a while. Now I’m loving it again for more adult reasons including work slowing down and being off altogether. I really love the decorations and the fact that some people still go all out. I love the delicious Sonoran enchilada ritual of my Moms fam on the Eve of. I’m also fine spending it alone in another state, with no family, watching seasonal flicks. Something about a tie that binds the years I suppose.
Anya
@MomSense: It’s not just them. All forms of religious fanaticism feeds on victimization.
Botsplainer
@SiubhanDuinne:
For me, the temptation to post a comment that said “Bitch” and then unfriending and blocking her would have been overwhelming. You’re probably a much better person than me.
Mike in NC
Before the month is out we should expect to see Bill O’Reilly’s next book: “Killing Christmas”.
wasabi gasp
Santa got a lap band. Fuck yo cookies and milk.
geg6
@Botsplainer:
Man, is there nothing that guy wrote that isn’t the goddam truth? Best American writer, hands down. No one else comes close.
Jewish Steel
@Botsplainer: That does sound kind of stressful.
We play renaissance and medieval music, A Child’s Christmas In Wales, string lights up, my wife bakes like mad and we often see old friends. Xmas is pretty chill ’round here.
Higgs Boson's Mate (Crystal Set)
@wasabi gasp:
Is he, too, a presidential hopeful?
Steeplejack
@Mike in NC:
I’m looking forward to his memoir, Killing O’Reilly.
Rekster
May be an old joke but I saw a tweet last night, something to the effect of
Bill O’reilly is celebrating Veterans Day this weekend, he’s a veteran of 11 War’s on Christmas
Couldn’t help but chuckle
He may be one of the leading Generals of the 101st Chairborne Brigade!
handsmile
Reading through all this humbuggery, I feel like nephew Fred visiting the offices of Scrooge & Marley. Keep it up and all you’ll be getting from Santa this Christmas is coal.
And that’s with a small “c”. Not its capitalized homonym that for some here would be like the best present EVAH!
MikeJ
@Higgs Boson’s Mate (Crystal Set): Haven’t you seen the youtube video of him screaming at an elf?
schrodinger's cat
I have the purrfect accessory for your Catmas partehs!
pamelabrown53
@Frankensteinbeck: I’m an agnostic and I love Christmas. Always have. I don’t care if stores have a Christmas department all year round. Even though it’s so about commercialism, you don’t have to participate.
The only real dislike I have are that the retail employees who have to work on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and the day after: it precludes them from enjoying the simpler pleasures of family and friends that makes the season so special. If a small Mom and Pop decide to make some $$$ for the “last minute shoppers” on Christmas Eve, then that’s their choice…if they do it alone. Also, there is no reason that the day after Christmas hordes couldn’t be put off for a day or a week, except that would require all the major retailers to act co-cooperatively. Which is pretty damn unlikely.
Fuzzy
@geg6: Totally agree and add Easter with all it’s shit about lent and palms to my list. I think May Day and it’s pagan frivolity is my favorite.
sparrow
@gbear: Heh. I had a boyfriend once who was a strange combination of super-leftist but also true believer. He tried to defend christian radio, and I pointed out, if you’re so talented at music, why do you only stick to one topic? Do you have nothing else interesting to say? Thankfully he quit putting that station on after that.
wasabi gasp
@Higgs Boson’s Mate (Crystal Set): Hopeful may be a little strong. Mrs. Claus is voting for Hillary.
SiubhanDuinne
@Botsplainer:
Yeah, probably :-)
She’s not someone I know well, but I will be staying in her home next spring when I do my long road trip to New England and the Atlantic Provinces, so I’ll save any unfriending and bitch comments until after that.
Citizen_X
@Fuzzy: But all three of those other religions–possibly excepting, ironically, Halloween–are actually Pagan holidays.
I don’t mind celebrating the year along with family and friends during the shortest days of the year, and I don’t mind celebrating fertility at the beginning of spring. There’s a reason we tend to celebrate around those times, no matter what religion.
Ruckus
@ruemara:
If conservatives had any actual positions other than no, if they had any actual morals about themselves, if they were able to employ logic, if they weren’t such fucking hypocrites they might, just might not have fucked up everything they have touched. But that’s not the conservatives we have. I think it’s a competition to see who can be the most fucking insane and piss off the largest number of people. The prize is probably a lollypop, cinnamon/salt flavor. This is most likely due to a handshake bet between god and the devil on which one is the most influential. The devil has a pretty good streak going, he’s beating god by using fundamentalists to beat religion/god right into the ground.
aimai
@ruemara: I’m really sorry, ruemara. I am so sorry you are feeling this bleak.
Tehanu
Halloween was great when (a) it wasn’t already being squeezed out by Christmas and (b) it was about children dressing up and getting candy. [I’m even OK with “kids” in their 20’s still doing it to hang on to childhood a bit longer, especially if they have kids themselves. But after 30, grow up for Chrissake!] And I think there ought to be a law against Xmas decorations in stores and on streets before Dec. 1. I get my first Xmas catalogs in August now instead of November. That being said, I can still muster some enthusiasm for Christmas because I have grandkids …but it does get harder as we get bombarded by it more and more. /END RANT!!
Matt McIrvin
Back in the Cold War, atheists were identified with The Commies!!! They were the greatest scapegoats you could have, because the Commies were the enemy. Now, only old people are scared of them.
wasabi gasp
@MikeJ: Yells at Elves is a bitchin’ name for a teabag emo band.
shelly
Doesn’t Palin have a WOC book coming out? I hear it even has recipes. Smoked timber wolf on triscuits make a tasty appetizer I’ve heard.
Baud
@SiubhanDuinne:
So for Christmas 2014 then.
Certified Mutant Enemy
Every year, the War on Christmas starts earlier. I’m old enough to remember when the War on Christmas didn’t start until after the War on Thanksgiving was over…
Certified Mutant Enemy
@Citizen_X:
Put Saturn back into Saturnalia!
shelly
The lamest canard of the WOC crowd is that ‘Merry Christmas’ has only recently, insidiously been replaced by ‘Happy Holidays’ by the kill-joy Politically Correct crowd.
Sorry guys, Happy Holidays has been around for a long, long time. (It was even a Bing Crosby movie that introduce ‘White Christmas.’)
‘Seasons Greetings’ too, but that doesn’t seem to make them as crazy as HH.
pamelabrown53
@Certified Mutant Enemy: Hah!
The so-called “War on Christmas is just right wing noise used as filler to keep the noise level and victhood cranked up to high frequency 24/7.
Certified Mutant Enemy
@Botsplainer:
Christmas is an awfulness that compares favorably with the great London plague and fire of 1665-66. No one escapes the feelings of mortal dejection, inadequacy, frustration, loneliness, guilt and pity. No one escapes feeling used by society, by religion, by friends and relatives, by the utterly artificial responsibilities of extending false greetings, sending banal cards, reciprocating unsolicited gifts, going to dull parties, putting up with acquaintances and family one avoids all the rest of the year…in short, of being brutalized by a “holiday” that has lost virtually all of its original meanings and has become a merchandising ploy for color tv set manufacturers and ravagers of the woodlands.
— Harlan Ellison
Emily
The Puritans, those guys who landed on Plymouth Rock, didn’t celebrate Christmas at all. (It was too popish.) And they were about as Christian as anybody would want. Why don’t we celebrate Christmas like they did? I bet that’d make Sarah Palin happy.
Also, when I was little, back in the 1950s, and TWOC hadn’t been invented, I figured that Happy Holidays was just a shorter way of saying Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
SiubhanDuinne
@Baud:
Total Win.
Certified Mutant Enemy
@shelly:
Every time you say “Happy Holidays,” an angel gets AIDS.
— Jon Stewart
geg6
@Fuzzy:
Yeah, not an Easter fan. That holiday I find totally bizarre and sick. Let’s celebrate the torture and public execution of a kindly hippie! Yay!
I love Thanksgiving. Love the food. Love the premise of looking back over the past year and finding the good that was. Love me some pumpkin pie most of all!
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
Yarp.
Hence our overlords’ outreach to Catheelick fascists in Latin America, Islamofascist jihadis in the Middle East, etc, all in the name of our common values as children of God united in a stand against godless communism. Fuck, we were practically ecumenical back then.
Jim Faith
@schrodinger’s cat: As H.L. Mencken said “Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”
SFAW
@Jewish Steel:
Hmmm …. Jewish kid … birthday on Christmas … hates wingtards and their anti-Christ-ian hypocrisy … hmm … your Mother’s name wouldn’t happen to be Mary, would it? Were you born in Pennsylvania (between Allentown and Easton)?
Looks like the Second Coming chose to show up here, instead of doing the whole “Left Behind” destroy-the-World thing. Thank FSM for small miracles.
ETA: Please don’t reply in Aramaic, I can’t read it.
FreeAtLast
I’m surprised at Palin’s inclusion of Jews in that last sentence. She is usually not that tone deaf. Maybe she too doesn’t have the time to approve everything her ghost writers come up with.
Speaking of tone deaf, did anyone else read that GW Bush is helping out in a big way with fundraising for a Messianic group intent on converting Jews? I heard it on TRMS last night. That is a sure way to anger big donor Jewish Repubs.
schrodinger's cat
@Jim Faith: That describes fundies of all religions, another thing they share in common is a huge persecution complex.
Bill E Pilgrim
I love that in #3 she says “Because having to hear a word you don’t like is a big frickin’ dehl”, and then in #16, complains that Walgreens used the word “Holiday” 36 times in one circular.
Never change, Sarah. If it made sense, it just wouldn’t be you.
satby
I’m old enough to rmember when “Happy Holidays” was considered perfectly acceptable to almost everybody, but when the country started to get more…diverse it became important to put all those non-Christian immigrants (not to mention any black folks that might dare to celebrate Kwanzaa) in their place and remind them they don’t really belong here.
Amir Khalid
@gbear:
It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Jo Jordan that she should fight for others’ rights because she owes it to those, not themselves LGBT, who fought for her rights.
cckids
@22over7:
Pity the poor souls who work there. In my youth, I worked one year at a KMart. They didn’t turn the Christmas music on back then until Black Friday, but they had one tape/loop that was only 90 minutes long, and played non-stop. There are songs on that tape I liked, but even now, 25 years later, I have a visceral reaction to hearing them. NOOOOOO.
maya
@Matt McIrvin: “Back in the Cold War, atheists were identified with The Commies!!! They were the greatest scapegoats you could have, because the Commies were the enemy. Now, only old people are scared of them. ”
Also, too, back in the Cold War, the communist menace was billed as the Red Menace. Nowadays those same scared old fogies are proudly Red State Republicans
The world turned upside down.
Fred
After the 4th or 5th one I quit. I just can’t stand listening to that bobble head. She just isn’t as good as Tina Fey.
JPL
Sarah must be proud of the good christians in Pine Bush, NY.
shelly
There was an episode of ‘The Simpsons’ where Flander’s singer girlfriend explains ““Christian rock is basically rock, but you replace baby with Jesus.”
eemom
Put me down under Christmas haters. Too much fucking WORK, and being a mother I don’t get to opt out.
And when I SAY I hate it, they get mad at me. Sucks all around.
cain
@John Weiss:
there is no such thing as a lapsed Hindu :-) you can do as little as you want or as crazy as you want.
BTW Hindus are probably the worst group to go after since I think most of us celebrate Christmas unless we want a kid riot on our hands.
Pogonip
@Jewish Steel: I like Christmas (the real thing). Hate The Holidays (fiendish plot to overwork women and get everyone to overspend). I wish The Holidays would go away so we could all enjoy Thanksgiving and Christmas in peace again.
Bob In Portland
Richard Dawkins has parachuted behind the lines at Slate.
Lurking Buffoon
@Citizen_X:
As a Pagan I am all for this. Every time I see a lawn sign that says “Keep Christ in Christmas” I want to put one down that says “Keep your Christ, give back our Yule Log!”
Comrade Dread
@schrodinger’s cat: Christmas is advancing on all fronts. It invaded Thanksgiving first. Americans no longer pause and reflect on the good things in their lives. They forego the company of family and friends to quickly cram down turkey and scramble out to trample over one another in a race to buy cheap useless shit they don’t need.
Veteran’s Day was next. Sure, there were a few pockets of resistance as some restaurants and shops held out and offered discounts to veterans, but Xmas was already in the air and on the shelves dominating and demanding attention.
Xmas next blitzkrieged into Halloween, having smashed through its first line of defense of America’s love of sugary treats, Halloween has fallen back on America’s love for alcohol and women dressed in skimpy fetish costumes. No one knows how long Halloween can hold out.
We expect the remaining calendar to be under St. Nicholas’ brutal rule, with the Presidents, the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and Baby New Year assigned to a common factory to churn out ever increasingly useless and cheap shit we don’t need.
Mullah DougJ
@Jewish Steel:
It’s the day your people killed Jesus, no wonder you like it.
satby
@Mullah DougJ: and go to the movies and eat Chinese. Which sounds like a very nice holiday tradition to me.
Jebediah, RBG
@Higgs Boson’s Mate (Crystal Set):
That’s an excellent point. Years from now, when I say this to people, I will not remember that it was your idea and not my own. Sorry!
PurpleGirl
I remember the Catholic Church’s “Keep Christ in Christmas” campaigns; doesn’t seem like they succeeded at all. I still think this should be the focus of the fundy groups. This is what they and their people aren’t doing. The rest of the stuff — decorations, trees, presents, etc. are (or should be) subordinate to a focus on Christ and his meaning.
As a child, Christmas was low key. We did keep the tree up until my mother’s birthday in January. My father loved decorating a tree. (I still have one of his ornaments, my sister threw out the rest of the things when she moved my mother upstate to Saratoga.) For a few years I didn’t do a tree, but I came to love the idea of the pagan connection and began doing either a tree or getting some pine branches to put in a very heavy crystal vase and decorate them. I love medieval and renaissance Christmas music, and many hymns. Modern “Christmas” music is often to maudlin as to be unbearable.
WereBear
For everyone who opted out of Consumerist Christmas, there’s all that much pressure on the rest. We throw a Solstice party and invite lots of people in an open house that lasts from noon until whenever. We get each other presents as budgets afford.
I draw the line at Christmas cards. It becomes a strange game of obligations, I get hand cramps from physically writing, and it’s insulting if you don’t. Not a card person, anyway.
Higgs Boson's Mate (Crystal Set)
@Jebediah, RBG:
No apologies necessary! Thanks for noticing my comment.
tybee
@geg6:
we used to have a ceramic jack’o’lantern that i’d put out on the front porch every easter.
mrs. tybee finally disappeared the pumpkin and i haven’t found another one.
yet.
Mike G
@maya:
The authoritarianism and burning desire to control and punish is the same.
Cain
@PurpleGirl:
I just hate the waste of a perfectly good tree. We have entire farms dedicated to getting a tree that you throw away two weeks later. It just seems wasteful.
tybee
@Cain:
our kids would go around the neighborhood the week after xmas and collect the trees that didn’t have tinsel on them.
we’d then have some bonfires you could probably see from space. amazing how big a flame a single tree can produce.
hello rochester
Irony: fundies and teabots lining up on Thanksgiving day to buy The Snowbilly Grifter Queen ‘s book about the War On Christmas.
hello rochester
Irony: fundies and teabots lining up on Thanksgiving day to buy The Snowbilly Grifter Queen ‘s book about the War On Christmas.
YellowJournalism
@Comrade Dread: Labor Day has no hope. It’s up to you, Fourth of July.
WereBear
Around here, “kissing balls” are easily obtainable and provide for our Odin acknowledgement needs.
I have linked because you don’t wanna google that.
PurpleGirl
@Cain: I like the aroma of real pine trees. When I just get pine branches I get the branches that have been cut off trees before being sold. (You could say I’m recycling the waste branches.) I don’t like plastic trees, which I don’t have space to store during the rest of the year.
PurpleGirl
@WereBear: Thank you. I like that. I may make one this year for my terrace.
Villago Delenda Est
@hello rochester:
These people (and I use that term with some trepedation) are all Mammon worshiping scum. Every last one of them. The true god of the fundies is Mammon.
karen
@Jewish Steel:
This year it’s the same time as Thanksgiving. Let’s see what Jewish person hating O’Donahue has to say about THAT!
jl
Why isn’t ‘Christmas’ on the front of the book? What kind of war-on-Christmas counter offensive is that? Phoning it in, indeed.
SiubhanDuinne
@YellowJournalism:
Canada Day is cowering and quaking at the proximity.
Cain
@PurpleGirl:
I do too but I still feel guilty about killing a perfectly good tree.
Barbara
I lost all my illusions about the Christmas spirit when I worked in the linen department at Macy’s one Christmas Eve many moons ago. A surprising number of drunks do their shopping at 11 p.m. on the 24th. “Would this be O.K. as a gift for my sister-in-law” one desperate shopper asked me, holding up a potholder. “It depends on whether you like her or not,” I replied.
YellowJournalism
@SiubhanDuinne: Valentine’s Day had learned to make preemptive strikes mid-December.
SiubhanDuinne
@YellowJournalism:
True story (which I’ve probably shared in these environs in past years): My mother managed our family-owned bookstore, and Christmas was, of course, the busiest season of the year for a small retailer. As a consequence of that (not to mention having four children to shop and wrap for), with the best of intentions, her Christmas greetings usually didn’t go out until after the 25th.
In fact, sometimes they didn’t get mailed until after the New Year.
Okay, mid-January. Groundhog’s Day. St. Patrick’s.
Until one year, a friend of the family went to the mailbox, opened the envelope addressed in my mom’s distinctive handwriting, and said: “It just wouldn’t be Mother’s Day without a Christmas letter from Elizabeth!”
WereBear
@Barbara: LOL!
I don’t know if that last-minute-shopping is a drunk thing, but it’s definitely a guy thing.
andy
You go to war with the christmas you have, not the christmas you want.
West of the Rockies
Pinhead Palin is trying to become the next Ann Coulter; unfortunately for her, she hasn’t mastered what passes as “comedy” among right-wing readers. I see she’s still dropping her goddamned ‘g’s: “Hearin’ a word you don’t wanna hear is a big, frickin’ deal.”
It is so clear that prior to ’08 she thought herself the smartest, prettiest, bestest person in the room: when ‘Merica did not fall to its collective knees to lick her boots, all that self-confidence turned into rage and resentment.
A Humble Lurker
I’ve never gotten the commercialism argument. I mean, yes it sucks, and I’d really rather less people were trampled, but if other people want to celebrate the holiday in a completely empty way why should I care? It’s almost hipsterish. ‘I totally celebrated Christmas, then it sold out’.
Maybe it’s because my Christmases have always been rather laid back and low maintenance but I still like it. I don’t care for it trying to eat Thanksgiving and Halloween, but by itself it’s all good.
seaboogie
@geg6: Christianism is all about co-opting pagan celebrations that are deeply ingrained in the changing of the seasons. Easter, eggs, resurrection…all about fertility and the coming season that brings forth new life.
Christmas is about lighting lights in the darkest season, when we gather together in the short days to help each other get through until the Spring solstice. The papists were smart about using pagan celebrations that are natural to us to mold it to their story and further their agenda. I seem to remember that the star that the maji followed could not have been in the winter season, but it was adopted thusly to fit into our natural pagan rhythms with the seasons.