I don't mean to sound overly tolerant of the Ebenezer Scrooge school of intolerance, but whatever happened to "Bah Humbug!"?

When I was a kid, plenty of people hated Christmas. The grownups used to complain about how the "real meaning" had been lost to crass commercialization, and Christmas was often said to be marred by human selfishness, stress, greed, war, etc. "Uncle Ebenezer" was intended to shame people into liking Christmas, while simultaneously appealing to their dark side. Mean people hate Christmas, and many people are mean. Whether they admit it or not, even people who aren't mean nonetheless have a mean, Scrooge-like side.

Which makes the guy likable, even before his annual, um, redemption.

The great W.C. Fields managed to actually die on Christmas, a day he claimed to hate. And in books written to entertain children (also hated by Fields), mean people have long been implicated as being anti-Christmas.

Why, there was a famous book called "How the Grinch Stole Christmas."

It's probably a sign that I'm getting to be a curmudgeon, but I remember when being against Christmas was once, well, funny!

As things stand now, there is said to be a "war" against Christmas, which takes the form of the ACLU, certain large chain stores (and of course, the evil, Homosexual-Agenda-supporting homos), all engaged in a puritanical (?) effort to censor out public references to Christmas, sanitize Christmas music, ban Salvation Army Santas, etc.

I heard all about this war last year too, and I hate to sound like a Scrooge or a Grinch, but I'm one of those people who gets a little stressed out during Christmas. I try to remember cards and gifts and shopping and traffic, and it's an emotionally draining time of year characterized by loads of last minute hassles driving around in the snow to search for gifts, write cards, put them in the mail, etc. It doesn't help much that tempers fray this time of year.

I've long suspected that there are a lot of people who inwardly hate Christmas for the same reason people used to complain about it when I was a kid, because it is such an immense obligation. But they're afraid to acknowledge this lest they be considered antisocial or Grinch-like. My parents are dead and I don't have kids, which means my family obligations are minimal, but it's still a big hassle, and I can only imagine what it would be like if I did have kids, inlaws, parents, grandparents. (It's almost scary to contemplate.)

As it happens, I don't especially like the fact that the big stores aren't playing Christmas carols as they once did, and I don't like the ACLU's idea of enforced secularism. But still, I just want to get in and get out and get the whole damn thing over with. There's something about being told that I have to boycott a store for being too secular that just rattles me even more than the knowledge that the store is being secular. People have a right to boycott whatever they want, but this shrill harangue -- each year -- that there's a war against Christmas, and we must all fight for our god, and that we must all Boycott! Boycott! Boycott!

I'm sorry, but it doesn't quite click with my already Christmas-stressed mental circuits.

There's no question that Christmas is Christmas, that it celebrates the birth of Jesus, but it's also long been a secular enough occasion that even Jews, Pagans and non-religious people celebrate it. I'm not sure it's anyone's business how they do or how they don't, and I'm sure as hell not about to make it mine.

What many people don't know is that war on Christmas is nothing new.
There was a time when it was actually illegal to celebrate Christmas in England and in Massachusetts.

Imagine, the Pilgrims were ahead of Scrooge, ahead of the Grinch, and even ahead of the ACLU.

Almost makes me want to be a Christmas war pacifist. But pacifism sucks.

How then, can we break the cycles of Christmas war?

AFTERTHINKING: Foamy has it right, IMHO. (Via InstaPundit.)

UPDATE (12/07/05): This flap (via Glenn Reynolds) over White House Christmas cards is too much. Really and truly too much. I don't care what you think about Christmas, whether you think it should be celebrated as a private family event, in solemn church services, drunken secular shopping sprees, pagan-derived yule log burnings, or not at all.

But if someone is kind enough to have gone to the trouble of sending you a card (and it's a lot of trouble, at least it is for me), the idea of getting offended by the card and sanctimoniously demanding corrections is just plain rude. I think it borders on the despicable. Many years ago, way before this "War On Christmas" was discovered, my father used to worry about offending people he didn't know that well, so he tended to use cards that said "Seasons Greetings." He wasn't trying to be PC; he was just trying to be nice. No one was offended by his well meaning attempt not to offend. Nor was he (or anyone else I knew) ever offended by receiving cards saying "Merry Christmas." Each year I send out cards, and I receive cards.

Never, ever, would I dream of hurting someone's feelings by being such an ass as to complain about a card!

What, I should hold those lucky enough to get cards from the White House to a different standard?

I see that WorldNetDaily's Joseph Farah proudly threw away his card. I'm sure Cindy Sheehan would be just as proud to throw away her card if she got one, and I don't doubt that if the White House cards had said "Merry Christmas," the leftist PC patrol would have complained.

Wish there was some way to declare war on Christmas asininity.