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Just two years ago, we heard much about the War on
Christmas,
and as nearly as I can tell, it has been
about as successful as the War on Poverty
or the
War on Drugs.
In other words, Christmas won.
Merry Christmas
appears in the television
advertising of various box-box stores. The lights of the
world's largest Christmas tree decoration
on Tenderfoot
Hill above Salida were turned on, complete with fireworks,
at a community celebration a few days ago. For the first
time in memory, the rental house next door even has strings
of Christmas lights on its front-yard trees.
Or perhaps they aren't really Christmas lights. They all glow white, and from what I've read out of Fort Collins lately, red and green lights are wholesome Christmas symbols, but little twinkling white lights represent a generic winter festival promoted by the Secular Humanist Worldwide Alliance of Political Correctness Opposed to Traditional Values.
I thought of asking my neighbor just why she chose to display white lights, but that seemed too simple. Instead, I started looking for whoever was behind the War on Christmas.
It took a while, but I finally found Endicott Scrooge, managing general partner of Megaglobal Capital Management, the corporate descendant of the 19th-century London firm of Marley & Scrooge.
He explained that he was the
great-great-great-great-grandnephew of Ebeneezer Scrooge,
one of the company's founding partners. Uncle Eben never
married,
Endicott said, after Belle, his true love,
got tired of waiting for him. But he had a younger brother,
Jeroboam, who took over the company after Ebeneezer had
that famous nervous breakdown, and I'm descended from
Jeroboam.
Ebeneezer had a nervous breakdown?
I asked. I
don't think I know what you're talking about.
Of course you do,
Endicott said. Charles
Dickens wrote about it in 1843. That night Uncle Eben said
he saw three ghosts, then started giving his stuff away the
next day? Believe it or not, he signed the firm up to pay
the medical bills of that Cratchit cripple. He could have
bankrupted the company.
That did sound serious. You're telling me it was a
sign of insanity when Ebeneezer started saying 'Merry
Christmas' instead of 'Bah, humbug,'
I said.
What else could you call it?
Endicott replied.
Poor Uncle Eben just snapped, and it was a good thing
that Grandpa Jeroboam could ease him out of the company and
step in to take over. The firm has survived and thrived for
generations.
And all those years you've been waging the War on
Christmas?
I asked.
More or less,
he conceded, but remember, we
didn't start it. When Oliver Cromwell and his Puritans took
control of England in 1645, they outlawed Christmas because
they saw it as decadent revelry. The Pilgrims of New
England felt the same way; they also waged war on Christmas
-- it was banned in Boston from 1659 to 1681.
But that was a long time ago,
I pointed out.
What are you doing today to war against
Christmas?
For one thing,
Endicott explained, we've
invented two new holidays to take people's minds off the
message of Christmas. The day after Thanksgiving is now
'Black Friday,' and it involves a pilgrimage to a shopping
mall while the national media focus on retail sales
figures. More recently, we have 'Black Monday' to celebrate
on-line retailing.
Pretty clever,
I said. And that takes people's
minds off 'Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men'?
Peace and good will are bad for our investment
business -- oil futures, commodity hedges, defense
stocks,
Endicott said. So of course we continue to
fight the War on Christmas.
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