Rebels against American Christmas

Fred Reed, noted ex-American curmudgeon, is sick of the saccharrine-sweet emptiness:

You see these automatons issuing from department stores groaning under things they didn’t want to buy, for people they usually don’t like, who don’t want whatever was bought for them. “What can we buy for Uncle Fritter, who we’d rather never hear from again but he just won’t die? Oh, look. Soap in the shape of a cute little burro. Just the thing.”

What used to be Christmas, and was a joyous celebration of Mithra’s birthday, or the solstice, or something else reasonable, has become the Winter Holidays or, more candidly, the Winter Shopping Season. It no longer has anything to do with Christianity, which has gone flaccid in the suburbs and in the heartland consists of lunatics waiting to be Raptured up to heaven as by a giant godly Hovermatic. You can’t call it Christmas. We must observe the constitutional separation of church and retail.

This fool business has apparently become the foundation of the American economy. I have read that without Holiday sales, retailers of things nobody in his right mind ought to want would go out of business. That’s a lot of retailers. I’m for it. I mean, how many ugly ties can the Republic stand?

Indeed. And how much support of and intermarriage with Mexicans, Fred, can it stand? Lovely people, but, ...

Jedenfalls. Garrison Keillor is also so sick and tired of the secularization and commercialization of Christmas, so much so that he honestly and carelessly (NPR has been largely responsible for his popularity) blurts out:

Unitarians listen to the Inner Voice and so they have no creed that they all stand up and recite in unison, and that's their perfect right, but it is wrong, wrong, wrong to rewrite "Silent Night." If you don't believe Jesus was God, OK, go write your own damn "Silent Night" and leave ours alone. This is spiritual piracy and cultural elitism, and we Christians have stood for it long enough. And all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck. Did one of our guys write "Grab your loafers, come along if you wanna, and we'll blow that shofar for Rosh Hashanah"? No, we didn't.

Oy vey. Ann Coulter should pick this line up.

(Keillor, for some odd reason -- perhaps while ruminating about all the other good things the Tribe has been doing to us over the last 50 years --, also includes Chosenite economic genius and former Harvard President Larry Summers in his rant.)

Ho, ho, ho! It gives me the jollies, I must say. Perhaps I shall try to sit through Mr. Keillor's silly program one more time this coming Sunday, in return for his small gift.

Meanwhile, Bishop Vladika Varlaam, of the Canadian Orthodox Broadcasting System, has an explanation for why many Christians are feeling that the Christmas holyday has been corrupted.