Sassafras Journal

I posted this last year but I think it’s just as seasonal this year:

Let me explain why I’ve not posted over the past several days: simply put, I’ve been waging a war on Christmas.

My liberal colleagues and I have been working in elfin haste to banish the spoken or written form of the phrase “Merry Christmas” during this holiday season. Farewell “Merry Christmas” and hello “Happy Holidays”! As the reviled “liberal intellectuals” we know that to win the war against the true meaning of Christmas we must wage the battle where the Christmas holiday retains its greatest spiritual significance: retail.

That’s right, if we’re to win the war, we need to attack it at the source– big-box retailers and their brethren. For it will surely mean the end of days for our liberal movement if we allow the phrase “Merry Christmas” to be uttered upon your completed purchase of a plasma TV or Xbox. Worse yet, if we allow those dastardly retail associates to proclaim “Merry Christmas” with every purchase of inflatable Santas, inflatable penguins and reindeer, our movement to vanquish Christmas will be lost. Christmas will win!

Enough snark.

If your celebration of the season relies upon the frequency and audacity of the phrase “Merry Christmas” at your favorite shopping destination, I get why you need a scapegoat. And what better scapegoat than the uber-evil “liberal”. I don’t need “Merry Christmas” or “Have a nice day” from my retail shopping experience– it’s rarely authentic, it’s more often than not disingenuous and trite. I will find much more joy in a heartfelt “Merry Christmas” from a paucity of dear ones than the unctuous and insincere proclamations from the many. Of course, this runs counter to the true meaning of Christmas which mandates ever more consumption; looks like words are now a material good as well to be accumulated and counted so the quality of your Christmas season has a new metric built around the utterances of the phrase, “Merry Christmas”. Somehow this now defines the righteous and just manner to celebrate the season along with a convenient way to gauge how good or bad the season will be; think of it as akin to Black Friday retail figures as a harbinger of the season.

Bah! Humbug! to that!

Have a very happy day