I suppose I’ve been too focused on such things as the actual war — you know, that thing in Ukraine. I didn’t even realize this conflict was still going on, until I saw this headline this morning:

The war on ‘Happy Holidays’ isn’t about Christmas

I reacted to that by tweeting, “People are still feuding over this?” Somehow, I had made it this far through the season without hearing about it. But that must be because I’m getting better at filtering out Kulturkampf nonsense. Anyway, my former neighbor and our sometime (but not in quite a while — ahem!) commenter Jen Fitz responded to my tweet thusly:

One day all the people working so hard to be offended this month will band together and just admit they can’t endure basic human interactions and everyday friendliness. Then they will immediately splinter again, but this time in vicious feuds over the correct way to take offense.

Yup. Anyway, back to what I was saying, if that “war” is still going on, I think maybe it’s now outstripped Afghanistan as “America’s longest.”

When did it start? I dunno. If you trying Googling that, you get an assortment of dates. You also get different accounts about who started it. I tend to think it was started by the simple-minded folks who started getting upset about “Happy Holidays” and launching verbal attacks on Starbucks. But even they were reacting to something, as the History Channel website notes:

Despite the commercialization of Christmas, it was still considered mainly a religious holiday for much of the 20th century. Over the last decade or so, secularists, humanists and atheists became more vocal about the separation of church and state….

When some popular retailers stopped using the word Christmas in their promotional materials and supposedly instructed their employees to avoid saying, “Merry Christmas,” it lit a fire under many Christians.

It also fired-up several cable news hosts such as Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, both of whom many believe took charge of the modern-day War on Christmas and made it a grass-roots campaign. As word got out, hordes of Christians signed petitions and boycotted the stores, forcing some to change their stance. Other stores continued to use general terms to refer to December 25….

That’s about when the actual “shooting” started in this “war.”

Libertarians and the Identity Politics crowd, of course, returned fire immediately, and this column, though coolly and civilly presented, reflects the ones-and-zeroes approach of so many on both left and right today, describing the “war” in these terms: “I am declaring my allegiance to one idea of America that opposes another: inclusive vs. exclusive.”

Unlike Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, Kate Cohen seems to be a kind and reasonable person. But she is still way too ready to draw battle lines and leap to choose a side.

My position is different. My position is, there is no war. Never has been. It’s particularly absurd if people who do believe in the war say it started in recent decades, with the adoption of “Happy Holidays.”

Because that was always with us. Or long enough for living, mortal humans to say “always.” The first date I come up with when I Google it is “by the 1860s.” I’m old, but that predates even me. I’m also a bit too young to remember the launch of the song “Happy Holiday,” back in 1942. Of course, Henry Ford would have had an immediate and nasty explanation for why Irving Berlin chose that wording. Folks may associate him with the F-150 today, but he’s probably our nation’s most prominent anti-Semite:

Henry Ford was an avid proponent of the idea that someone — or more precisely, some group — was waging a war on Christmas. “Last Christmas most people had a hard time finding Christmas cards that indicated in any way that Christmas commemorated Someone’s Birth,” according to The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, a widely distributed set of anti-Semitic articles published in the automobile magnate’s newsweekly during the 1920s. “People sometimes ask why 3,000,000 Jews can control the affairs of 100,000,000 Americans. In the same way that ten Jewish students can abolish the mention of Christmas and Easter out of schools containing 3,000 Christian pupils.”…

I was about 4 years old at the time the TV show “Happy Holidays from Bing and Frank” aired. But by that time, I saw and heard the phrase everywhere. I didn’t take any note of the John Birch Society’s screed in 1959 against the “assault on Christmas” carried out by “UN fanatics…” Of course, as far as could see, nobody during my childhood took much notice of that group except MAD magazine, which gave me a somewhat comical impression of the organization.

Anyway, the phrase was everywhere when I was growing up, and I don’t think it had anything to do with the ACLU — although the ACLU would later do what it could to stir up unnecessary fights over creches and the like. The phrase dates to a time before the Culture Wars. And it always made sense. And you didn’t have to be lighting the menorah to see that.

Even Christians — assuming they were knowledgeable about their own faith, and their own culture (which some Christian sects, and especially those individuals whose embrace of “Christianity” extends no further than having a cultural identity to cling to) — had, and have, good reason to say “Happy Holidays.” Particularly if they’re Catholic, or Anglican, or Lutheran or Methodist. But any Christian does. Let’s see… between the semi-secular Thanksgiving and the end of the 12 days of Christmas, in the Western church we have:

• Advent, beginning four Sundays before Dec. 25. That’s right — despite almost everything you hear out in the commercial-cultural complex this time of year, it is not “Christmas” at the moment. Not yet. It’s Advent — which lasts longer.
• The Feast of Immaculate Conception, Dec. 8. Although admittedly, this one’s not huge among most of our Protestant friends.
• The Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Dec. 12. Of course, I don’t suppose many of the folks who complain about “Happy Holidays” celebrate this one. They’re too busy being furious that people who do celebrate it keep trying to get into our country. Even though, since 1945, she has been the patron of all the Americas.
• Hanukkah, which is going on right now. Not Christian, you say? Well, the three most prominent figures in the Christmas were Jewish, so it seems related to me. Hanukkah sameach, Jesus, Mary and Joseph!
• The 12 days of Christmas, the first one being on Dec. 25. Of course, we don’t know what time of year Jesus was born, but these are the days when we celebrate the Nativity.
• The Feast of the Holy Family, on the Sunday between Dec. 25 and Jan. 1.
• The Feast of the Circumcision of Christ. Oops, there we go again — being reminded that Yeshua bar Yosef was one of those Hanukkah people.
• The Feast of the Epiphany, Jan. 6. Remember, we don’t sing “We Three Kings” before that day.

And according to my math, that means we Christians have multiple, plural holidays during this period that many oversimplify as “the Christmas season.” I may be leaving some holidays out there, but I need to draw this silly subject to a close at some point.

Which I will now do, leaving you with a “Merry Christmas” since that’s the next one up. But I also wish you happiness on all these other holy days. Yeah, folks, that’s the etymological root of “holidays.” We may have added a lot of secular meaning to them, but they are holy days.

So, you know, cut it out with the “war” nonsense…

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