The Professor
		12.23.05
	Merry Christmas. 21st Century-style. Fox News anchors have worked themselves into quite a later lately. California spirits and New York sophisticates have, too. Depending on how you look at it, either Christmas is being combed and picked out of our public discourse by the barbarians of the secular left, or Christmas is being used by the theocratic right as a billy club against reasonable consideration for non-Christians. It may not have seemed possible just 20 years ago, but we have now entered an era in which Holidays, which aren't especially holy days anymore, have become grounds for cultural division and political agitation. Good. I want this controversy to get as nasty as it can possibly get. I want to see leftists railing against Pat Buchanan and rightists lambasting the New York Times. If Bill O'Reilly of Fox News fame doesn't pop a forehead vein by December 25, that will be one less gift I get for Christmas. If Adam Cohen of the New York Times doesn't reduce the conservative right to the likes of the Spanish Inquisition, I'm going to enjoy my New Years' scotch just a little ... bit ... less. I want people to use really ugly words as they beat this horse out the other side of this earth. I'm serious. You see, there are alternatives to this kind of deliciousness we're seeing on our national table this holiday season. One would be the kind of emptiness that comes when everyone takes their tray tables to their own room: Instead of being forced to speak our minds about our values, our beliefs, and our priorities, we could enjoy the convenient truth that no one was going to inconvenience us. That's nice for a while, but I don't think it's a tenable proposition as we begin to make more room for the dining room in coming years. Another alternative would be the kind of satisfaction that comes with the Christmas fruitcake: We all look forward to it, but most of us do so only because it feels like something we should be looking forward to. The same could be said for any other number of staid traditions that we as families and as societies have come to expect. The next time you demand that City Hall put a nativity scene on its front lawn, ask yourself: How often do I drive by City Hall? A final alternative would be to rest assured that the service is divine when the dessert is sinful. I'm sure it is nice for folks to have a Wal-Mart greeter waiting at the sliding doors to greet them with a friendly "Merry Christmas". I wonder, however, why so many have taken such umbrage with hearing "Happy Holidays", instead. The culture wars aside, is there perhaps a small part of us that needed Wal-Mart to lend validity, credibility, or legitimacy to our holiday haul? Does that warm greeting help to smooth over the roughness that the shopping season has become for all of us? Does it reveal what we already know, kind of, already: that very little of what happens during the Christmas season has to do with the birth of Christ anymore? I wonder. Yes, there are alternatives, and they all reveal something about our values -- including the ones we may not be so proud of. We are being pushed into turmoil by our political and cultural leaders, and we should be thankful as they make our lives so difficult. Many of us  are being forced to talk about our belief -- and perhaps even to learn a few things about our neighbors. Many of us are being torn from our traditions -- and maybe beginning to see novel ways to celebrate the season. Many of us are having to cope with a lack of conspicuous Christmas advertising -- and perhaps now realizing that commerce had turned the Season of Giving into the season of gifts. So enjoy the New Christmas. It's not like the Old Christmas, but it's not any less for that.
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