December is not even half over, and already the war on Christmas has started. Out in the Red State of Colorado, where traditional culture supposedly thrives, the city of Denver has waded into a little cultural gunplay that is attracting national attention.

But Denver is not the only battlefield. Increasingly it looks like Christmas may be pitched in the same trashcan as the Confederate Flag.

In Denver, local merchants have for years sponsored a pallid festival called the "Parade of Lights," which sported Santa Claus but no Christian images. The "mood," as the New York Times described it last week, "was bouncy, commercial and determinedly secular." The Parade "shunned politics and anything remotely smacking of controversy, including openly religious Christmas themes that might offend." (Well, not entirely.) [A Question of Faith for a Holiday Parade, By Kirk Johnson, December 6, 2004]

It's interesting there's someone in Denver who thinks that "openly religious themes" in a Christmas event "might offend."

It's even more interesting to consider that someone in Denver actually would be offended by such themes.

But perhaps most interesting of all is that nowhere in the entire New York Times story, despite several references to "the controversy,"is a single person or group identified who actually admits to being offended by religious imagery.

The people who were offended were local Christian groups fed up with the absolute refusal of local businessmen to mention religion at all. This year the Faith Bible Chapel sought permission to run a float in the Parade of Lights that carried explicit religious themes with a choir singing hymns and carols.

Permission denied. Too controversial, you see. Can you imagine what would happen if somebody in a Christmas parade actually started singing "Silent Night"? The horror, the horror.

Michael Krikorian, [Send him mail] a spokesman for the Downtown Denver Partnership, which sponsors the parade, says they don't allow "direct religious themes," and that includes "Merry Christmas" signs and singing or playing traditional Christmas hymns. 

"We want to avoid that specific religious message out of respect for other religions in the region," Mr. Krikorian smirks. "It could be construed as disrespectful to other people who enjoy a parade each year."

But the horror of being misconstrued apparently extends only to Christian themes. The Parade of Lights, as the Rocky Mountain News reported, "includes the Two Spirit Society, which honors gay and lesbian American Indians as holy people; a German folk dance group; and performers of the Lion Dance, a Chinese New Year tradition 'meant to chase away evil spirits and welcome good luck and good fortune for the year.'" [Parade prohibition puzzles preacher, By Jean Torkelson, Rocky Mountain News, December 1, 2004]

Sounds sort of like a "specific religious message," no?

Nevertheless, denied permission to chase away the evil spirits of their choice, "hundreds" of Denver area Christians showed up on the sidewalks anyway and sang "carols about mangers, shepherds and holy nights, handed out hot chocolate and spoke of their faith."

There you go. The witchcraft trials can be expected to start any day now.

In fact, nothing much happened, except the businessspersons now say they are going to have to "re-evaluate" the event.

"This was always just supposed to be a cutesy parade, for the kids," says Jim Basey, president of the Downtown Denver Partnership. "The purpose was to get bodies downtown." No offensiveness for Mr. Basey.

Denver is not the only city to enjoy a little Christmas cultural warfare. The Washington Times reports that the mayor of Somerville, Mass. [Send him mail] as issued a public apology for "mistakenly" calling the local "holiday party" a "Christmas party," while "School districts in Florida and New Jersey have banned Christmas carols altogether, and an 'all-inclusive' holiday song program at a Chicago-area elementary school included Jewish and Jamaican songs, but no Christmas carols."

In Kirkland, Washington, a school banned a play of "A Christmas Carol" because of Tiny Tim's prayer, and neighboring libraries banned Christmas trees.

The website Vdare.com sponsors an annual scrutiny of the "War Against Christmas." It has lots more examples.

Christmas, to be fair, is not an exclusively religious holiday, though Christians are entirely right to insist on preserving that meaning among others. It's a celebration that has been around so long it has acquired non-religious meanings as well, but meanings that go well beyond Santa Claus and Frosty the Snowman.

It's a festival that comes from the heart of the traditional West, which is why music, literature, films and common social customs center around it so much.

At least some of the people who want to abolish it are not intentionally anti-Western. They're people who have simply disengaged themselves from their own civilization and are entirely indifferent as to whether it survives or not.

Being strangers in their own land, they no longer have a clue as to what Christmas and its symbols mean.

And it's not only Christmas that's "just supposed to be a cutesy parade." It's everything else their civilization has created.

COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Sam Francis [email him] is a nationally syndicated columnist. A selection of his columns, America Extinguished: Mass Immigration And The Disintegration Of American Culture, is now available from Americans For Immigration Control. Click here for Sam Francis' website. Click here to order his monograph, Ethnopolitics: Immigration, Race, and the American Political Future.