See also: PETER BRIMELOW: Yes, Virginia (Dare,) There IS A War On Christmas. Trump, FWIW, Is Still Fighting
As someone who remembers the serene monocultural Ireland of 50 years ago, to me the most shocking 2023 War On Christmas atrocity was came via Irish Conservative @RealIrishCONS about the “Seasons Greetings” X/Tweet from Chief Commissioner Sinead Gibney of the Irish Human Rights Commission dated December 22 which opens
Seasons Greetings to you all ahead of the December break
and goes on to praise her fellow commissars.
Season's Greetings from our Chief Commissioner Sinéad Gibney. pic.twitter.com/SoC63OL60x
— Irish Human Rights & Equality Commission (@_IHREC) December 22, 2023
This from Ireland?
Happily, the comment thread shows the Irish people have lost none of their fabled fluency. As of this writing, the comments are not yet deleted, probably because the aforesaid commissars are on a civilized Christmas break.
Complain to Sinead Gibney: [email protected]
(Currently, her email autoreply says
I’m out of office until 2 January 2024.
Happy new year to all.
See “civilized Christmas break” above.)
In America, the War On Christmas savagery discussed by VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow in WAR AGAINST CHRISTMAS 2012: The Eight Stages Of Christophobia, specifically section 5. War on Christmas Finally Gets Nasty 2008-9 has more recently vanished from the national media for what appear to be tactical reasons. Essentially all Google Alerts on “War On Christmas” now consist of War On Christmas Denialism. (One exception: The ’War on Christmas’ Is Real, by John Pudner, Newsweek.com, December 23, 2023.)
However, dimmer bulbs on the periphery have not all got the message.
So we still find black journalist Cynthia Tucker [Email her] in People of all faiths deserve happy holidays [TimesNews.net, December 23, 2023] asserting
…the “war on Christmas” crowd is aiming for something that the Founders worked hard to prevent: a theocracy in which we are all forced to live by the narrow and rigid practices in which they believe.
So, if you object to Christmas being eradicated from the American Public Square, you want a theocracy.
Good to know.
A timely reminder that crazy Leftist black women are currently the shock troops of America’s communist Revolution
Also in the periphery media, the impression arises that the task of writing a routine War On Christmas essay is being assigned to the weaker brethren. Thus we get What is the So-Called “War on Christmas” Really About?, by Kerry Guida, Medium.com, December 19, 2023.
This appears to be the result of a quick Google search on earlier work, repeating the insulting attribution of particular Christmas tradition to pagan origins that was popular some 20 years ago. (VDARE.com has been in this War a long time!)
This of course is quite beside the point: as with Christmas trees, recent generations of Christians have embraced them.
History is not Guida’s strong suit. She says:
Interestingly, America’s first European settlers hated Christmas … Christmas was not celebrated in early America and was actually outlawed in Boston from 1659 to 1681.
The first permanent English settlers were of course in Jamestown, Virginia in 1607. Not religious radicals, they were more representative of England of the day. No evidence has ever been produced that they rejected Christmas, and even thoroughgoing Puritans celebrated Christmas in church, rejecting only the excessive feasting and drunkenness which they thought of as irreligious—see James Fulford’s 2014 Puritans Didn’t Start The War On Christmas, Because They Didn’t Hate Christianity. And, as documented in Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America by David Hackett Fischer (a book every American should at least skim) the Virginia settlements were later substantially reinforced by refugees from the Commonwealth of England (1649-60) fleeing the rule of Puritans of the New England type.
Guida is even weaker on the Bible:
In fact, the birth of Jesus isn’t even mentioned in the bible…
WHAT!
How about Matthew 1:18-25 and Luke 2:1-7—probably the best known of all Bible passages.
Kerry Guida is weird.
Unhappily the War On Christmas is real and is deadly serious. Consider Not Even ‘The Chosen’ Advertisers Get To Say ‘Merry Christmas,’ by Andy Hogue, The Hayride, December 19, 2023. This powerful discussion, which has its own list of War on Christmas atrocities, reports:
We watched “The Chosen” on the CW network on Sunday night—an independently funded, serialized drama about Jesus’s ministry and his band of disciples and other followers that went from streaming to the airwaves on June 9—and none of the advertisements mentioned Christmas. If we missed one it was either quick or local. Yes, even during a show about Jesus.
Again, this is nothing new, but that an indy Jesus series has been in weekly national syndication for half a year certainly is. With so much attention on micro-markets and niche advertising you’d think that block of programming would be full of overt Christmas wishes. Alas, no.
My view: The commissars who control the Regime Media have decided to limit the War On Christmas campaign to prudent levels. They have enough to do suppressing news of the collapse of the southern border. They are only playing their farm team.
But with the impending voter fraud horrors facing us in 2024 we can count on it: once America—in Barack Obama’s words—is “fundamentally transformed,” they plan on coming back.
Email Patrick Cleburne.