Announcing VDARE.COM’s War Against Christmas 2005 Competition!

By Peter Brimelow

Yes! VDARE.COM’s War Against Christmas Competition, looking for the most outrageous attempt to abolish Christmas, is being held this year as usual. I was just slow finishing this article, with the gratifying result we’re getting impatient email and blogs (here and here and here).

Please send entries here; specify if you do NOT want your name and email publishing. And note one victory already: our friendly bookstore Amazon.com, which last year was refusing to offer a Christmas logo or to explain why not, now provides one! (See left column—go in through a VDARE.COM link when you send Christmas gifts and we get a commission at no cost to you!). Thoughtful email from VDARE.COM readers no doubt helped Amazon see the Christmas lights

Our winner will receive champagne, an inscribed copy of Alien Nation—and the thanks of a grateful civilization.

As I recount every year, I got John O’Sullivan to start a War Against Christmas Competition in the mid-1990s, when he was Editor of National Review. The last Competition ran in 1997, at which time William F. Buckley for his own discreditable reasons had already fired O’Sullivan, but not yet leaked the cover story that he was “resigning to write a book.” The War Against Christmas Competition was promptly dropped, along with the cause of immigration reform. In 2000, NR itself actually published a “Holiday Edition.”

This neatly made the point that the War Against Christmas is umbilically linked to the War Against the West, of which nation-breaking mass immigration is a part…and that established political leaders cannot be trusted to fight it.

We’ve come a long way since then. The early news this year has been of Khristmaskampf rollbacks: House Speaker Dennis Hastert has told federal officials that the U.S. Capitol should go back to calling its “Holiday Tree” a “Christmas Tree”; [No More 'Holiday' Trees At Capitol November 29, 2005,Washington Times, By Gary Emerling] First Lady Laura Bush actually used the C-Tree word when referring to the conifer in the White House (although when queried by the press she started babbling about Hanukkah); after a threatened boycott, Wal-Mart ended the ludicrous (but telling) situation whereby its website search engine produced 200 mentions of Hanukkah, 77 mentions of Kwanzaa, but only a “Holiday” page if “Christmas” was entered; even the MSM has acknowledged the rollback trend (Some retailers give the word ‘Christmas a nod, By Theresa Howard, USA Today, December 1, 2005) Why avoid using 'Merry Christmas'? by Beth Joyner Waldron, Christian Science Monitor, December 1, 2005).

It’s important to note that this rollback trend can be seen throughout the Anglosphere, like the War Against Christmas itself (i.e. the Khristmaskampf has nothing to do with any alleged constitutional “separation of Church and state” which doesn't apply in England, or Australia.).

For example, the town council of Oxford, Nova Scotia, Canada, has voted that Christmas should be the only name officially to describe the “holiday season”. The province sends a Christmas tree to Boston to commemorate the help the city gave after the 1917 Halifax ship explosion. This year, great distress was caused by the news that Boston had unilaterally renamed it a “Holiday Tree”. “When it left Nova Scotia, it was a Christmas tree,” said the Premier of Nova Scotia.

Boston’s betrayal is a reminder that the Khristmaskampf continues full bore. It can be seen in the Bush White House’s frantic zigzagging, well chronicled by WorldNetDaily.com: this last Friday, Presidential press secretary Scott McClellan responded to a question about why the president's traditional Christmas party for journalists had been renamed a "Holiday Reception" by saying “this is a time to welcome people of all faiths.”

IN other words, Christmas does not welcome people etc. And that is the point about the Khristmaskampf, “Happy Holidays” etc.—it is, as Chronicles’ Editor Tom Fleming put it in a classic essay, “insulting and Christophobic.”

This year, battle will be joined.

So deck VDARE.COM with War Against Christmas Competition entries!

One final thought—“Elaine” writes:

“Is it legal for an employer to tell its employees they cannot say ‘Merry Christmas’ to their customers? I understand from a friend here in Santa Rosa, Ca that an employee at the Mervyns was berated for saying it to a customer. My friend heard the manager say it was corporate policy no one was to say ‘Merry Christmas’ in their stores.” [ask Mervyn’s about this]

A notable number of lawyers have written in about our War Against Christmas Competition. I invite their comments.

But meanwhile, the solution seems obvious: say “Merry Christmas” in Spanish. That way, if Mervyns utters a mutter, the EEOC will prosecute.

A blessed and Merry Christmas to all our readers.

P.S. Help save Christmas - email this out!

Peter Brimelow, editor of VDARE.COM and author of the much-denounced Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster (Random House - 1995) and The Worm in the Apple (HarperCollins - 2003)