Today, it's Winnipeg. For the past couple of weeks, it had been Albany, Georgia. The season began in Fargo. Every day, to get myself in the festive holiday mood, I listen on my computer to one of the now several hundred radio stations from around North America that dedicate themselves shortly after Thanksgiving to playing Christmas -- or, if you will, "holiday" -- music every hour of every day until December 25th or so. My officemates look at me in peculiar ways when I loudly remind some distant program director that – damn it! -- that creepy Dan Fogelberg song is NOT a holiday favorite, even if it does have "Auld Lang Syne" in the title.
(I also tend to involve myself in faraway local news. For example, today I was happy to learn that the city of Winnipeg does plan to plow our residential streets this year -- Why was that even a question? I should have started listening sooner -- and that we backed down the United States Senate on the issue of softwood lumber. Whoo-hoo! God keep our trees, glorious and free!)
In other words, I am Christmas silly. Always have been. It is a week out or so, and already I've seen the Alastair Sim Christmas Carol three times, and the Charlie Brown special twice, and I even watched the abomination that NBC has made of It's A Wonderful Life. The lights go up as the Thanksgiving dishes are drying. The crèche has moved this year from the front hall to the dining room due to a sudden influx of science and theology books into what used to be our temporary Bethlehem. The kids are older now, so dinosaurs no longer make regular appearances in the Nativity scene between a sheep and St. Joseph. However, due to the fact that our particular crèche consists of four different sets amalgamated into one, we are afflicted by an overabundance of Magi -- seven, to be precise, of varying heights. We have adopted for our visiting kings the management principles of the average Middlesex County highway crew, except that none of them are depicted leaning on a shovel.
All of this goes by way of saying I wish to Christ -- you should pardon the expression -- that Bill O'Reilly and John Gibson, and all the rest of the broadcast world's idiots would shut up and leave me alone to enjoy the damn holiday.
(Uh-oh. That's a little shrill. Jacob Marley's going to be around to call again.)
There's no point in explaining now that the "War on Christmas" was produced wholly in the depths of the Id Workshop that is the Fox News Channel. There's no point in explaining how ashamed any legitimate outlet that gave this nonsense a half-minute's thought should be, let alone three minutes of precious airtime or five precious column inches. At this point, what with his having hung his libido on the phone lines with care, O'Reilly should be treated in the more respectable precincts of the media the same way those bearded gentlemen who claim the Rockefellers infested Harvard with space aliens are. He should be greeted at the door with a smile, a pat on the back, and a handful of Thorazine, and then sent on his way. What was worse about this, though, was that he dragged my holiday into his own megalomania. It was like going to the zoo and seeing your beloved heirlooms being thrown around the monkey house.
I don't love Christmas because some people don't. I don't love Christmas because I got caught talking dirty to a subordinate, paid her off, and now have to recoup my position as an arbiter of family values and a peddler of overpriced slacks. (If you were Bill O'Reilly, would you try to sell anyone your pants? Who would buy them? Wouldn't they have to come equipped with both a lawyer and a Hazmat suit?) I don't love Christmas because it makes me better than anyone else.
God, what a tortured, joyless place that must be to live. At least, Scrooge had an excuse. His father was a creep and his sister died, and Belle dumped him because he was trying to make a go in business. Early on, when his estranged nephew tells him he doesn't keep Christmas, he replies, sensibly, "Let me leave it alone then." A sensible response, given what had happened to him. It wasn't for him, but he didn't try to ruin anyone else's Christmas -- not even that of Bob Cratchit, to whom he grudgingly gave the whole day off. No wonder the Spirits gave him a second chance. He was at least open, somehow, to the possibilities of the season.
These guys, though, they're infinitely beyond that "wretched, covetous old sinner," to quote the (well-written) Spirit of Christmas Past. They claim to enjoy the season and then use it to bludgeon everyone else. They're chasing down school districts in Texas and Christmas pageants in New Jersey. They're screaming at Wal-Mart as though there was a soul there to which to appeal. Seasons Greetings? Hell, no. Happy Holidays? Hell, no. God rest ye merry gentlemen? Hell, no. We're all going through Yuletide boot camp, complete with calisthenics. It's like dealing with the Saudi religious police, except they're wielding sprigs of holly. Dickens would never have had a chance. Instead of falling to their knees, they would have given poor, dead Marley a 15-minute lecture on his own shortcomings. Christmas Present would have thrown them out the damn window. The Cratchits wouldn't have had them in the house. Tiny Tim would have flogged John Gibson from the doorstep with his crutch.
Whack!
God bless us all, everyone.
Charles P. Pierce is a staff writer at The Boston Globe Magazine and a contributing writer for Esquire. He also appears regularly on National Public Radio.
