He left out “I AM A GUN-OWNING PATRIOT!”

I’m just not feeling the Christmas Spirit without “Christmas” spelled out in bullet holes.

Only Culture Warrior conservatism could manage to take a beautiful thing like “Merry Christmas!” and somehow add the subtext, “You America-hating sons of bitches!” 

I remember back in the 80s and early 90s, a few snotty lefties decided Christmas was too Republican or something.

Message received and ignored, snotty Lefties. It was their loss that a few of them were too PC to enjoy it. People went on celebrating Christmas anyway. Pretty soon, this silly moment passed.

But then, in a classic “becoming what they hate” turnabout, conservative Culture Warriors picked up on this Lefty hiccup of PC disdain and began a decades-long annual festival of self-pity and belligerence with no end in sight.  Somehow, Christmas managed to stop being about the birth of Jesus even in the act of angrily shouting “Jesus is the reason for the Season!” and conservative Christians in dire need of Insensitivity Training started keeping a hawk-eyed tally of how many times some harried clerk said “Happy Holidays!” or “Season’s Greetings!” so they could be sure of maximizing their sense of illusory “offense”.  Instead of “Peace on earth, good will to men” perpetually aggrieved “Real Christians” forgot all about the good news of the Incarnation and turned it into yet another occasion to be angry about the loss of political power in American culture and to breathe out a toxic vapor of simmering anger every year at the command of the Right Wing Noise Machine.

Memo to Normals: I’m not with the guy who made that sign.  Merry Christmas!  (Or more precisely, Happy Advent!  Christmas starts in about two weeks and I fully plan on partying all 12 days of it–though I don’t really object to starting early!  Love this time of year!)