Now that right-wingers have taken up “Merry Christmas,” of all things, as a crusade, what’s an indifferent secular humanist to do? I could spitefully retort “Joyous Solstice and Kwanzaa Greetings,” or stick with the indifferent “Happy Holidays” or inanely generic “Season’s Greetings” (after all, the solstice greets meterorological winter), but spite will only mean that the Christmas terrorists have already won. Not that they really have any standing, though, as Eric Zorn noted in the Tribune on the 23rd,

Even though scriptural clues put Jesus’ birth in the warmer months–September, many scholars say–Christian leaders set the date for celebration to coincide with existing celebrations tied to the winter solstice… Jesus is not “the reason for the season,” as so many from “the Christmas group” have smugly informed me in recent weeks. The return of the sun in this hemisphere is the reason for the season, and there are many ways to celebrate it…

It’s sad to see these angry people turning a glad tiding into a battle cry, especially since it’s totally unnecessary: The dominance of Christmas and Christianity in this country is not threatened by efforts to allow all belief systems in on the seasonal jollity.

The only threat comes from those whose “Merry Christmas” now includes an implicit nyahh-nyahh.

I mean, get over yourselves, people! If I don’t particularly care for Christmas, it hardly means that Christians are wildly persecuted in America. Just because you can’t force your religious views onto other folks, whether by taking a store’s decorating choices too seriously or “leading other children in prayer” at school or wallpapering a courtroom with the Ten Commandments, doesn’t mean that those other folks are on a wild-eyed anti-religious pogrom. It just means that everyone gets along just a bit better when we’re not all trying to convert one another.

By appropriating the words for their “revolt” in the culture wars, they’re doing what right-wing jingoists did when they appropriated the American flag for their brand of “love-it-or-leave-it” patriotism in the 1960s: defiling a symbol in a misbegotten effort to save it.

Having grown up entirely in the Reagan era of “US flag = jingoist political crusade,” I can’t say that I have ever held any great affinity for the flag. These days, I feel just a twinge of sadness that I’ve never been able to feel any sense of ownership towards the flag. The same also goes, of course, for the ubiquitous “support our troops” slogans — another ostensibly neutral, patriotic symbol that (since “patriotism” really means “rightist nationalism”) now establishes partisan bona fides rather than genuinely declaring actual support of the troops.

Supporting the troops once meant mending clothing and buying war bonds, but the hard-working but still desperately poor people of China have apparently found it in their hearts to sew us new clothes and buy our war bonds. Stateside, all that we do is loudly trumpet empty symbolism. USA! USA!