What is particularly interesting and too often ignored in this moronic debate is that, if ever there was a “War on Christmas,” it was fought for ardently by the celebrated “forefathers” of the American nation itself, the Puritans, who prevented any private or public celebration of Christmas in New England well into the eighteenth-century. In short, the Puritans hated Christmas—hated, hated, hated it. For them, it was a Catholic celebration without Scriptural or historical merit (they believed Jesus to be an autumn birth) that had obviously co-opted a Roman pagan holiday. Cotton Mather derisively referred to it as a “wanton Bacchanalian feast” and Puritan authorities happily punished anyone found to be celebrating Christmas for “disturbing the peace.” Indeed, Governor William Bradford issued his first such punishment in 1620—just weeks after the first Thanksgiving.

We can mock these people all we want and, to an extent, rightly so. But it may be worth reflecting on our own complicity in perpetuating an atmosphere in which this behavior makes any sort of sense. Christmas, as it is generally practiced in postwar America, works to solidify our increasingly pathological obsession with filling some hollow void with "stuff." Regardless of the financial burden that may ensue, the measure of a parent becomes their ability to procure some stupid new fad in order to fulfill a desire that was largely imposed upon their children through effective advertising. And the myth of Santa helps neatly obfuscate the production of the goods we buy: have you ever stopped to think that “Santa's elves” are often actually just children working in slave labor conditions out of our sight? 

Debbie Downer, maybe, but it might be something worth actually stopping to think about before we supposedly celebrate "Christian charity."

But let’s return momentarily to the “War on Christmas” for a moment. The phrase “Happy Holidays” is, most likely, just as old as the greeting “Merry Christmas,” and was certainly in widespread use by the 1950s—long before the age of multiculturalism, tolerance, and “political correctness.” Even still, as American society has diversified over the past sixty years, it has become increasingly difficult and problematic to assume a Christian audience. And other December celebrations (Hannukah and Kwanzaa) have gained increased recognition as holidays no more constructed, and no less American, than Christmas.

In short, “Happy Holidays” became both a phrase of inclusion and a method of marketing to a wider audience. It is most certainly not the denial of a “sacred” Christian holiday nor of some uniform American religious tradition. After all, the “War on Christmas” is much more of a longstanding American tradition than Christmas itself. If you want to say "Merry Christmas," go for it, but the persistent attempts to make it compulsory (or to criticize those who prefer something else) are not only ahistorical, they are part of a larger agenda to recreate an imagined version of an homogeneous “Christian America” that never really existed in the first place.  

In this vein, Christopher Hitchens has famously, and I think convincingly, argued that Christmas turns the country into a quasi-totalitarian state:

"As in such dismal banana republics, the dreary, sinister thing is that the official propaganda is inescapable. You go to a train station or an airport, and the image and the music of the Dear Leader are everywhere. You go to a more private place, such as a doctor's office or a store or a restaurant, and the identical tinny, maddening, repetitive ululations are to be heard. So, unless you are fortunate, are the same cheap and mass-produced images and pictures, from snowmen to cribs to reindeer. It becomes more than usually odious to switch on the radio and the television, because certain officially determined "themes" have been programmed into the system. Most objectionable of all, the fanatics force your children to observe the Dear Leader's birthday, and so (this being the especial hallmark of the totalitarian state) you cannot bar your own private door to the hectoring, incessant noise, but must have it literally brought home to you by your offspring."

I don’t want entirely to be a Grinch here (only mostly). Christmas can also be a good time of family, of celebration, of charity, and so on. But what does it say about modern society that we need to set out a particular time of the year (besieged with compulsory conspicuous consumption) in order to do all those things?