Most of what FOX News misguidedly sees as a war on Christmas involves retail outlets that decide not to use the expression, “Merry Christmas,” when customers enter the store leave through the checkout lane. This to them is an absolute affront on the pious sensibilities of good Christians and their infant man-god. Aside from me thinking it sounds somewhat deranged to wish someone a “merry Christmas” when it is not Christmas (I wouldn’t wish anyone a Happy St. Patrick’s Day two weeks before St. Patrick’s Day), I find it interesting that they have decided the problem is retail stores. Charles Schultz lodged an early complaint about the commercialization of Christmas being the problem with Christmas: garish light displays and the horribly high expectations put on people to have everything perfect. This isn’t the problem for FOX News. They want the purveyors of commercialization to strengthen the bonds between their crass exploitation of the holiday and the word “Christmas.” “Christmas” the holiday and “Christmas” ‘what you get fot Christmas?’ should be the same thing. To them, the war is embedded in language, specifically, that one word: CHRISTMAS! For Peanuts’ creator Charles Schultz the problem was what that word “Christmas” had come to represent in popular culture, which is precisely what FOX News thinks it ought to mean. Schultz and FOX, if meeting head to head today, would be on opposing sides in this imaginary war. Schultz wanted the opportunistic leeches out of the Christmas game. FOX wants them forcibly shackled to it.
The fact is, Christmas as it plays out in the retail shops of this country has nothing to do with the birth of the savior of all mankind – at least all of mankind that fervently believes that God turned himself into a man – one that had to be born and grow up in order to be executed by the state and spend a weekend in Hell before returning to life and abracadabra we’re all good insofar as that whole eating from the fruit of the tree of knowledge thing goes. Christmas for the shop owner is profit. For the tree farmers: profit. For the manufacturer of light strings and glowing nativity sets and blinking fucking Santas: profit. The economy doesn’t give a fuck why you buy, only that you do… Christian, Musilim or Jew.
FOX is not involved in a war on Christmas. They are fighting a war on language. They are fighting a war on thought. They are positioning themselves as the bullies of the free market. For FOX, the free market is the greatest thing any society has ever come up with, but if it doesn’t behave the way they want it to behave, then it’s an evil secular institution. They want to Christianize the market place, which is fine by me. Let’s convert the churches into malls and may the taxation of religion commence or, contrarily, classify all commerce as an act of religious freedom and tax nothing. I for one will be naming my yacht the “Merry Christmas, Sucker!”
Midland Prose 