Quick Hits

We're almost off for our holiday travels. As always, I still intend to drop by at least enough to get some sort of new post up every day, but I'll admit right now that their substance might be lighter than normal. It's possible that even that lighter blogging might get sidetracked, as the Blackberry doesn't seem to be working at the moment. It was fine this afternoon, so it may just be a temporary problem with the network--perhaps it's being overwhelmed with last-minute shoppers searching desperately for some consumer information. If this is actually a longer-term problem, I'll have to make more of an effort to get online, but I'll tackle that if I have to. For now, here are a couple of items to feed the beast.

• Via AMERICAblog, here's a column from Dan Radmacher, the editorial page editor of The Roanoke Times, entitled, "Christian Bullies Manufactured This 'War on Christmas.'"

But what's so wrong with "Happy Holidays" as a season greeting? The word holiday, after all, is derived from holy day.

More to the point, what is un-Christian about taking a little extra care not to make a non-Christian feel excluded this time of year? You don't love your neighbors by rubbing their faces in beliefs they do not share.

But the biggest reason many Christians like me can't get agitated about the so-called "War on Christmas" is that there is so little evidence that such a war is happening.

Christmas decorations started going up in the malls before Halloween, for heaven's sake.

Last I looked, Christmas retained its status as a federal holiday. Christmas specials still fill the airwaves

And in a nation where, as O'Reilly likes to point out, something like 90 percent of the population celebrates Christmas in one fashion or another, I don't believe a war on Christmas is even possible.

Other than a pathetic attempt to boost O'Reilly's ratings, I think the whole brouhaha is little more than an excuse for the Christian majority to excuse holiday excesses that only recently were cause for guilt.

There's an unattractive undercurrent of intimidation in all of this.

As Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus wrote last year during a similar outbreak of Yuletide battle fever, "There is an ugly, bullying aspect to this dispute, in which the pro-Christmas forces are not only asking, reasonably, that their religion be treated with equal status and respect but in which they are attacking legitimate efforts at inclusivity."

O'Reilly is not the first to allege a war on Christmas. An article last year on the anti-Fox News Web site News Hounds recalled that Henry Ford made the same allegation in his anti-Semitic tract, "The International Jew."

It was also a favorite refrain of the John Birch Society in the late 1950s.

What happened to the days when the main concern of Christians at Christmas was that the true meaning of the season would be lost amidst all the hoopla over Santa Claus, Rudolph and the unrelenting pressure to spend, spend, spend?

• In a report on Christmas specials on TV from NPR's On the Media, Ron Simon, curator of the Museum of Television and Radio, makes in intriguing point:

That Charlie Brown can understand the meaning, that the misfit toys of Rudolph can be part of an entire Christmas, and that somehow even the sourpuss of sourpusses, the Grinch, can be part of a harmony, of a more perfect union, and, uh, that type of feeling, that idealism, is not part of our culture today, but it is a postcard from America's past [transcript mine--you can listen to it yourself if you want to]

Is that correct? Is this not really a part of our society anymore? What happened? Is it gone forever?

• I'm obviously not the first person to comment on Time magazine's choice of person of the year this year. If you haven't heard, it's you, or me, or that guy you bumped into getting on the train, or whoever. The magazine cover is supposed to have some sort of reflective substance on it so you can see yourself , but the couple of copies I looked at had a less-than-ideal reflection. The person I saw when I looked was an imperfect duplicate. Has Time actually named Bizarro versions of the American public (what about the international editions--are the people reading those people of the year, too?) as the person(s) of the year?

• This is the time of year that we talk about the birth of Christ, but I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone make any reference to Christ's bris. He was a Jewish baby, so he must've had one. I'm not sure I've got anything to say about this, but I received this article from Slate. Apparently, Jesus' foreskin is missing. It's a mystery what happened (and it seems to have happened over twenty years ago, so it's not exactly a pressing issue), but author David Farley thinks there's a strong circumstantial case that the Vatican's got it. Speaking of circumcision and Slate, male readers with a good dose of masochism, may want to take a look at another article from last week, which explains the process used to perform an adult circumcision. No, I didn't read the whole thing.