War on Christmas?

I meant to blog about this sooner- but because I didn't snap a pic (bad blogger! Bad Tom!) it slipped my mind a bit. But in Ft. Collins, we drove past a billboard sponsored by the Knights of Columbus proclaiming:

'Keep Christ In Christmas'

Argh. 'Tis the season, I guess- happily, Republicans have more reasons to be gloomy right now instead of gearing up for the usual battery of complaints about Christmas this and Christmas that and the 'War on Christmas.'

This is where I come down on this stuff: first of all, everyone is wrong. The Right (War on Christmas types) freak out because Christmas is 'being expelled' from the public square and freak out about the moral decline of America and the anti-Christian hatred and yak, yak, yak... but: in about a two month period you have Thanksgiving, Diwali, Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, and the Winter Solstice and potentially Ramadan. The great thing about America is that walking down the street, I can't reliably tell (a lot of the time) which religion my neighbor practices- hence, I won't get offended if someone tells me 'Happy Holidays' because really, they have no way of determining what holiday I might be celebrating this winter.

Oh and p.s.: I think we should celebrate them all- it just means more partying, more time off work and heck, I'd get a daishiki and have a Kwanzaa Party if people were up for it. It'd be the American Melting Pot we all hear about.

But! Lefty types also are wrong (the strictly secular, bland, all Santa, no Jesus Christmas types) because there's a fundamentally incorrect assumption about expelling religion from the public square- I don't care. I really don't- I think if you're going to go after a Nativity Scene at Christmas, you're no better than Scrooge. And, because people who do flip their shit at the sight of a single Jesus in the public at Christmas tend too (I'd put money down on this) subscribe to the whole 'politically correct' thing and I think that's just a backwards path into censorship.

Sooooooo, what to do then? Well, it's Christmas. Stop being so damn serious about it and remember what the season is for- and if you're going to freak out about it, well then let's celebrate everything! All of 'em. Holidays and days off left and right- if there is no established religion in this country (as the Founders intended) then that means we can't put one ahead of the other. So bring 'em all on. (And declare two random holidays- one for atheists, one for agnostics- just so they don't feel left out.)

Plus, if we took the 'Christ' out of 'Christmas' I'm pretty sure we'd be left with 'mas.'