The Duality of Christmas

I probably have a similar post every year, but here I go again.

Christmas, by it's very name, is a Christian holiday.  Manger scene, 3 wise men from the East bearing gifts, star in the sky.  It's all in the Bible.

You know what's not in the Bible?  Flying reindeer, decorated evergreen trees, mass commercialism, eggnog, and a fat guy who lives at the North Pole:

There was a huge dust-up in the IT community this week after Microsoft caved to a developer who complained about a festive Santa hat embedded in the code, saying the "religious" symbol was "offensive."

The drama played out on GitHub, the leading open-source code repository, which hosts Microsoft's open-source projects, including the popular developer tool VSCode.

Earlier this week, a user named Christian-Schiffer opened an "issue" on the platform complaining that someone at Microsoft had inserted an " Easter egg" into the code, displaying a Santa hat to users. "Santa Hat on vscode insiders and pushing of religion is very offensive to me," he wrote in the subject line.

"Additionally xmas has cost millions of Jews their lives over the centuries, yet even if that was not the case, pushing religious symbols as part of a product update is completely unacceptable," he went on to say. "Please remove it immediately and make it your top priority. To me this is almost equally offensive as a swastika."

When I think about the "War on Christmas",  I don't consider the problem to be anti-Christian.  I consider the problem to be puritanical leftists who can't stand the idea that someone, somewhere, is having a good time.

As a teacher, I understand prohibitions about having religious iconography in our classrooms.  I knew a teacher who was pretty incensed when he was told he couldn't have a small creche on his desk--his personal work space--because of his position of authority over the students who went up to his desk.  But there's no religious iconography at all in Santa, in snowmen, in flying reindeer, in Christmas trees.  Anyone trying to ban those in public is just a mean-spirited, sad little person who won't be happy until no one else is.  They deserve to be scorned and mocked, not kowtowed to.

That is why I don't ignore the War on Christmas.  Christmas, my favorite holiday?  I won't cede an inch of that ground to lefties.