12/26/05 3:45 AM: NOTE: All links were current as of Kwanzaa 2005 -- if link rot takes 'em after that, ah well ...

If there is to be an organized war on Christmas, I'll likely be made a lieutenant. Against, in case you missed that point.

I called one of my sisters (and no, I won't say which, because they're somewhat on the secretive side) on the 24th, when I was at work, because I'm trying to strengthen my relationship with her (and my sisters in general). So I said, "Happy holidays," which she replied in return. Her young son (I won't say how young -- again, my sisters are very twitchy about their privacy, even making me look non-paranoid by comparison) was nearby and said, and I quote, "No, mommy, you gotta say 'merry Christmas!' Or you're taking God out of the holiday! Say it!"

Hannibal shudders uncomfortably.

She acquiesced, because she said she was very tired (anybody who has kids will be tired on Christmas Eve, another parent told me the next day), but it scared the hell out of me. Those are very big ideas to be jammed into a juvenile brain. I don't know where he heard that, but I did find out where the source of this theorem was.

I went to Google and did a search on "war on Christmas," as I'd been hearing it around several of the same sounding ideas. When I got results, I clicked on this link and watched the video, a chat between Fox News pundit Bill O'Reilly and his co-worker, author/TV host John Gibson. Gibson wrote a book called The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought -- no, I'm not making that up. Now, according to these two, there's an organized effort as part of a "secular progressive agenda to get Christianity and spirituality and Judaism out of the public square" which includes "legalization of narcotics, euthanasia, abortion at will, gay marriage." At the root of this, apparently, are a series of retailers who use the word "Christmas" in advertising and/or instruct their employees to say "Happy Holidays" and not "Merry Christmas" to shoppers in December.

Now, before we even get to the real, legal points of "separation of church and state" which was so important to the Framers that they included it in the Constitution, or even the basic public policy issues of not promoting any single religious perspective over another regardless of how overwhelming a majority its supporters enjoy, let's just talk about simple philosophical points. The idea behind Christ Mass (mild digression: I had a somewhat drunken conversation with a young Australian named John at a place called Circle Bar in Santa Monica about the root of the word in particular late on the 24th -- no, the bar was not circular, nor was there any dominant theme of circles ins the interior design therein, it's apparently just a name) was to share in a Eucharist rite with others of the faith in order to become closer to Christ. Okay, that sounds fine. Now, the fact that very little of the Catholic trappings remain, well, whatever -- that's Martin Luther and John Calvin and their whole Protestant movement in a nutshell. They wanted to remix Christmas for their view of Christ, fine by me. Whatever. The central point, regardless of the slant on Christianity, is to try and embody the characteristics of Yeshua ben Josef, er, I mean, Jesus Christ. Forget about your jolly old, Saint Nick, strip things down to brass tacks.

In the words of Douglas Adams, your boy Jesus got nailed to a tree by some angry people of his same ethnicity and my least favorite people in all of history, the Romans, for basically saying that people should be nice to one another. Boil his message down to essential bullet points, and that's it. I'm pretty sure even old Bill O'Reilly could agree with that.

So, if Jesus was about being nice to everybody for no other reason than its own sake, and Christmas is a holiday about celebrating Jesus (his birth, Eucharist, whatever), then isn't it, oh, I dunno, just a smidge hypocritical to criticize the way anybody chooses to celebrate it, much less marginalizing people who -- shocker -- happen to have different faiths (again, covered in the Constitution)? Isn't that what the so-called Founding Fathers packed up their wooden teeth and their slave-humping ways to leave England for in the first place? To have somewhere that they could just mind their own damned business and not have anybody tell them the rights or wrongs of their chosen spiritual path?

I get the disconnect for many followers of the cross -- it's one I had, when I played for that team. The church is always nudging its members to go "evangelize." You'll even see "missionaries" traveling to other parts of the world to "spread the gospel." One particularly loco ex-girlfriend of mine believed that for every "sinner" she converted, she would receive "crowns" in heaven that would elevate her, making her heavenly experience better than other people. Which kind of skewered the idea of heaven in my mind at all, but since she was completely barking mad and gave the worst oral sex in the history of space-time, despite being four years older than me (I'm sorry, ladies, if you haven't learned how to give oral sex by your early thirties, you've missed some crucial life lessons), I often tended to take her ranting with a grain of salt. So you've got all these converts -- and there are few as zealous as the newly converted, looking to reinforce their own faith with the strength of numbers -- out there dead set on bringing everybody else over to their side, come hell or high water (in some cases, literally). This makes them want to do things like contradict the law of the land for the benefit of their beliefs, to ram a religious-spawned "holy day" down the throats of an entire nation, and so on. I get that urge. It's wholly illegal, completely against both the spirit and the letter of the law, and coincidentally damned rude as hell, but hey, we all have our crosses to bear, pardon the phrase.

One of the easiest ways to learn the true value of tolerance is to be placed in a position where one would benefit from it. Growing up a Southern Baptist, I flaunted the "rightness" of my faith wherever I went, despite the fact that my actual life of rage and violence and deception and lust was so contradictory to the philosophies I espoused that it was too funny and pathetic to be hypocritical. After I got older and did a whopping amount of research and developed some new ideas, I suddenly was behind a religious eight ball, persona non grata amongst the "flock" and doomed to an eternity of fire and brimstone. Okay, fine, if that's what somebody thinks, great. As long as they stay out of my way when I'm going to the store for lemonade or minding my business on any random morning.

What if you're Muslim? Or a Jehovah's Witness? Buddhist? Agnostic? Hebrew? Ba'hai? Wiccan? Atheist? These are all faiths that put no stock in decorated pine trees or "Oh Holy Night." Having an opinion that they're wrong is fine and dandy. You can have all the opinions you want, heck, go on and have a litany of opinions that'd make Homer's Oddessy look like a pamphlet -- that right is a basic human one accorded to you by law in this country (according to the publicity materials -- your mileage may vary). Trying to legislate that opinion through actual public policy and societal pressures, again, borders on being a hate crime and flies in the face of good manners and common courtesy.

a Now, note I've stayed in the realm of a fairly universal argument. I didn't talk about ships jammed with chained Afrakans five and six deep, sleeping in their own waste and crying out in hundreds of languages for a chance to just go home, then driven into crappy shacks and told to worship Michaelangelo's vision of a guy who'd been dead two thousand years (and no, I'm not even gonna get started on the idea that there never was a Jesus at all -- let's try and stay focused). So their celebration of this holiday being even more egregiously insulting, nah, I'm not even bothering to go into that. I consider it a truth that's self-evident. No, probably best for the sake of the argument to stay on the side of a relatable experience for virtually all people.

Now, it's no secret that I hate Christmas -- I've gone into the reasonings why in great detail. I won't deny that. Despite my loathing for the architecture of this nation, as a person born in the United States I am allegedly afforded a variety of luxuries, including the right to go about my own business and my own beliefs as long as I don't overly bug anybody else. Apparently, a certain sect of Christianity is exempt from that limitation and enthusiastic about depriving me of that right. Why? They're shmucks, I suppose. "How" is a much more fascinating question, in my mind. By employing more talented storytellers, they're able to tap into the secret urges of "normal" people. Ill-educated, fearful, malleable normal people, who number in the hundreds of millions. People who buy Britney Spears records, or people who voted for George W. Bush twice, or still believe that Iraq had anything to do with the events of September 11, 2001.

My father had a word for people like that. "Stupid." I simply refer to them as "the normals," as in saying to my friends when we're out, "don't antagonize the normals, they outnumber us!" However, as long as the best-trained and/or most successful storytellers in the world (myself included, as I have received instruction second to none) continue to choose art and money over power (or the alleged "second party" -- the Democrats are embarrassing and there's no other real prospects with a war chest worth mentioning -- don't get their act together and make it worthwhile for storytellers and marketers to use their skills for electoral purposes), that's the way it t-i-is. Americans like a good story, and they'll pretty much listen to whoever gives it to them. Even a repetitive, scary story (like, I dunno, a "war on terror." Good luck with that ...). As I so often ask, cui bono? Who profits from a War on Christmas? Surely not me -- fighting an uphill battle against insurmountable odds for nothing more that common courtesy as a prize. No, O'Reilly and Gibson and their muckraking sorts get the financial benefit, as do the makers of consumer goods who consider their beach head in the mindshare of my nephew a major victory.

On the other hand, Professor Thomas Green said, in my first semester at USC in 1991, "it only takes ten percent of the population to revolt and overthrow a country." Since the "red states" have done it without revolting (although they are "revolting" in many ways), I'm just saying that all of a sudden a war on Christmas -- be it cultural, informational or what have you -- seems like an acceptable rallying cry if we're to get anything done at all. If Bill O'Reilly and John Gibson are soldiers on the other side, well, that seems like I should be looking for a recruitment center. I'm just saying ... maybe a "war on Christmas" is a fight for sheer survival.