Since this newly-born "holiday" lacks the historic significance of, say, World Water Day, Google, starting from zero, sits this one out with no special logo on its splash page. Again.
(At least Dogpile's artists spent 15 minutes to dress up its mascot for the day. And as Mark Steyn notes, sadly, some aspects of the season are becoming a bit too much for traditional churches)
Rob Port writes that retail sales were up 3.6 percent, or 2.4 if you discount fuel sales:
(though it seems to me that those should be included; the economic health of our gas stations is every bit as important as the economic health of our retail stores).Indeed.TM And speaking of which, Glenn Reynolds notes that online sales were up over 22 percent. And don't miss this email from one of his readers:* * * The New York Times is calling these retail numbers “bleak,” but I’d be willing to wager that the folks at the Times would be dancing in the streets if their stock prices had seen 3.6% growth instead of the negative growth their stock has seen for most of the year.
The same schmuck, Michael Barbaro, wrote a similar story in 2005. He also wrote a story back in September of his year trying to say back to school sales only looked good, but really weren't:But the Times has layers of gatekeepers: Editors! Researchers! They wouldn't let an error or anything that smacks of an agenda creep into their paper, or its reporting on economic conditions, both here and abroad.Why do we care what the some schmuck at the New York Times writes anymore, anyway?
It's like reading something Andrew Sullivan writes and instead of saying, "Sullivan thinks....." we write, "The Blogosphere today announced that...."
Bologne. We need to get out of the habit of saying, "The New York Times....." and giving backing to these folks. Instead, we should say, "Michael Barbaro wrote....." and treat him just like we'd treat anyone in the blogosphere.
(And despite the best efforts of the MSM to throw cold water on it, we hope your Christmas was as enjoyable as ours. Watch for intermittent posting from us the rest of the week.)
Update: "Seven Year American Recession Watch Remains On High Alert", and it will for another 11 months--and maybe even another four years after that.
Posting will no doubt be a bit sparse on Christmas day (not that I was a posting machine yesterday, of course; I'm very happily on vacation this week). In the meantime, let me take this opportunity to wish everyone:
Related:
And via Hot Air:
Neo-Neocon: "Twas the bloggers’ night before Christmas."
Jonah Goldberg writes, "It’s a profound commentary on the state of our political culture that Huckabee’s ad is the controversial one. Huckabee promises nothing, Hillary everything":
The contrast between the Candidate of God and the Candidate of Goodies should remind everyone of P. J. O’Rourke’s timeless book Parliament of Whores.Years ago, I remember hearing Doris Kearns Goodwin on PBS describe LBJ's Great Society as his way of giving "gifts" to the American people--and Johnson being quite surprised when the public at large (both the right and the then-burgeoning far left) turned on him. "You should like me, I'm giving you all these gifts" was (as best as I can remember) Goodwin's description of LBJ's mindset. I guess I shouldn't be surprised to see that politicians (and their hagiographic sycophants) still think of redistribution of taxpayer money as handing out gifts.“I have only one firm belief about the American political system, and that is this: God is a Republican and Santa Claus is a Democrat,” wrote the indispensable O’Rourke.
“God” he explained, is “a stern fellow, patriarchal rather than paternal and a great believer in rules and regulations. He holds men strictly accountable for their actions. He has little apparent concern for the material well being of the disadvantaged. ... God is unsentimental. It is very hard to get into God’s heavenly country club.”
P. J. continues: “Santa Claus is another matter. ... He’s nonthreatening. He’s always cheerful. And he loves animals. He may know who’s been naughty and who’s been nice, but he never does anything about it. He gives everyone everything they want without the thought of a quid pro quo.”
“Santa Claus is preferable to God in every way but one,” O’Rourke concluded. “There is no such thing as Santa Claus.”
P.J.’s right. But you won’t be hearing that from Hillary this holiday season.
Roger Kimball reprints a holiday greeting he recently received:
To My Democrat Friends:Video related to the former greeting, here.Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low-stress, non-addictive, gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasion and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all. I also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2008, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America great. Not to imply that America is necessarily greater than any other country nor the only America in the Western Hemisphere. Also, this wish is made without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith or sexual preference of the wish.
To My Republican Friends:Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Forgive me, then, for wishing everyone Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Megan McCardle looks back at America's wild and carefree recent history:
The wild, drunken office Christmas party used to be a staple of television, books, and movies. Now I feel as if it's dropped pretty thoroughly out of the popular imagination; the only example I can think of recently is a fleeting scene in Bridget Jones' Diary. Were office holiday parties really that much wilder in the past? Or have we just stopped noticing, literarily?Something tells me that David Harsanyi can answer Megan McCardle's question.
(By the way, note the reference to AMC's Mad Men series in the comments.)
Rachel Lucas on the joys of Christmas shopping at the local shopping mall.
Tough for me to argue with this gentleman's approach to Christmas catalogs--or the lack thereof.
Update: "This originated with James Dobson's Focus on the Family, and I saw it on the blog of a former Penthouse editor. The internet is a strange place." I doubt J.B.S. Haldane would argue!
...Or the sterile lack thereof.
(Say, I wonder if American Thinker's Jack Kemp knows Pajamas' Bill Bradley, in the apparently growing ranks of eponymous new media punditry?)
Kathy Shaidle writes:
Guy who used to be married to supermodel, then looked in the mirror and said to himself, "Hell, I'm Billy Joel, I can do better" releases anti-war song called "Christmas in Fallujah".Billy would have been better off if he was collecting royalties on the number of rewrites of "We Didn't Start The Fire" appearing in YouTube videos this year.Here's what Christmas in Fallujah will actually be like, as opposed to the "Christmas in Fallujah" of Billy Joel's menopausal multi-millionaire daydreams.
Three updates on the ongoing War On Christmas: First up, Tom Blumer explores when the C-word is acceptable for use by leftwing journalists:
It seems beyond dispute that there is a strong bias against using the word “Christmas” to describe not only the shopping season, as noted above, but also events, parades, and festivals that happen during the Christmas season. There is, however, a bit of an exception — “Christmas” is a word that is much more acceptable to use when “Scrooge” employers are letting people go.Meanwhile, Mark Steyn explains what two recent newsworthy incidents say about the cultures that produced them:
East is east, and west is west, and in both we take offense at anything: Santas saying "Ho ho ho," teddy bears called Mohammed. And yet the difference is very telling: The now-annual Santa lawsuits in the "war on Christmas" and the determination to abolish even such anodyne expressions of faith as the Pledge of Allegiance are assaults on the very possibility of a common culture. By contrast, the teddy bear rubbish is a crude demonstration of cultural muscle intended to cow and intimidate. When east meets west, when offended Muslims find themselves operating in Western nations, they discover that both techniques are useful: Some march in the streets, Khartoum-style, calling for the pope to be beheaded, others use the mechanisms of the West's litigious, perpetual grievance culture to harass opponents into silence.Finally, Jules Crittenden writes, "Surgeon General to Santa: Lose It, Fat Boy!"Perhaps somewhere in Sydney there's a woman who's genuinely offended by hearing Santa say "ho ho ho" just as those New Hampshire atheists claim to be genuinely offended by the Pledge of Allegiance. But their complaints are frivolous and decadent, and more determined groups are using the patterns they've established to shut down debate on things we should be talking about. The ability to give and take offense is what separates free societies from Sudan.
But isn't that rather culturally insensitive of the Surgeon General? Not to mention out of his jurisdiction, unless the US is claiming the North Pole as our 51st state. And even if we were, wouldn't Santa be grandfathered, due to his centuries of living up there?
(Don't miss this comment by one of Jules' readers, which puts the Cold Civil War and its northern front into sharp perspective.)
Related: Which stores dare to use the C-word? "The Attack on Christmas 2007" lists the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly on the retail front of the American overculture's War On Christmas.
Update: And speaking of taking No Offense just smidge too far, just click.
iYule.TV puts a virtual fireplace in your pocket.
As Orrin Judd writes, "Doesn't this need to be a streaming simulcast?"
'Tis the season when the front lines in the Cold Civil War temporarily become a bit more visible to civilian observers. Even as Rasmussen reports...
As the holiday season begins, 67% of American adults like stores to use the phrase “Merry Christmas” in their seasonal advertising rather than “Happy Holidays.” A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that just 26% prefer the Happy Holidays line....Thanksgiving is slowly becoming another Holiday That Dare Not Speak Its Name, as the left's efforts to further atomize traditional American culture proceed apace.
Jeff Jarvis explores "The real media consolidation: Google":
Bottom line: Google controls nearly 40 percent of online advertising.And yet, for a company involved in as many diverse projects as Google, Zombie notes that it's definition of "diversity" is awfully skewed in one direction:Now pair that news with the folding of TimesSelect. Consumers, as we used to be called, won’t support media and journalism with their money. Advertising will. We will become entirely dependent on advertising. And what happens when Google controls the majority of online ad revenue in this country? They’re headed there, for as a TechCrunch commenter points out, Google’s online ad revenue and share of revenue are growing faster than online advertising as a whole.
On the one hand, we should be grateful to Google for enabling the support of much new media. On the other hand, we should fear teh vice in which Google holds our privates. That’s where media power is consolidating — not in old conglomerates (some of which now depend for a good bit of revenue on who? — on Google.)
Google is completely infected by the multicultural bug, and that means they’ll honor anything that isn’t part of the “traditional” culture or power structure: American, Christian, conservative, and so on. I’m neither Christian nor do I consider myself a conservative, but even I bristle at Google’s hubris.Read the whole thing.
One of Charles Johnson's readers get the standard form letter that Google's been sending out every year since at least 2005 regarding their lack of a Memorial Day splash page, despite having pages commemorating World Water Day, and the birthdays of Edvard Munch, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Percival Lowell, and Ray Charles. (Though the international celebrity with a huge fanbase born on December 25th remains oddly unnamed each year by Google...)
Because the art designers at Google seem remarkably stumped by the unique design challenge that is Memorial Day, Zombietime is soliciting reader help.
Zombie is requesting that contest entrants keep things as tasteful and reverent as possible. Call me unnecessarily cynical and churlish, but something tells me though, whatever they design just won't make the cut with Google.
Tom McMahon flashes back to his 2005 post to remind us:
The logo above is from the year 2000, but for the past 4 years Google has snubbed Easter. While ignoring Easter this year, Google has had the time to celebrate such Major Holidays as World Water Day and International Women's Day.Like Christmas, Easter is well on its way to becoming yet another Holiday That Dare Not Speak Its Name.
Update: Related thoughts here.
He hits the beach--literally--in India!
Students join sand sculpture artists to create a 30-meter-long (100-foot-long) Santa Claus sculpture on the Puri golden beach, in the Indian state of Orissa on the eve of Christmas, Sunday, Dec. 24, 2006. Though Hindus and Muslims comprise the majority of the population in India, Christmas is celebrated with much fanfare.As TigerHawk writes, "The photograph and official wire service caption below are additional evidence that India is the 'natural' ally of the United States in the war against radical Islam. Also, it's really cool".
Surf's up, Santa, Dude!
The Media Research Center has a pretty good scorecard for who stands where this year in the War For Christmas.
Posting will no doubt be a bit sparse on Christmas day. In the meantime, let me take this opportunity to wish everyone:
Update:
Welcome, and Merry Christmas, to Hugh Hewitt and his listeners!
Meanwhile, Neo-Neocon looks back on "'The Blogger's Night Before Christmas".
More: Merry Insta-Christmas!
Floyd Brown reminds us that the left's assault on Christmas isn't a new development.
Update: Via The Anchoress, here's the newest low in the War On Christmas, courtesy of, not surprisingly, CBS. Compare and contrast with CBS's mid-1960s Christmas fair.
Last year at Thangsgiving, I posted some thoughts on Rough Creek Lodge, an upscale hunting lodge and resort on 11,000 acres in Glen Rose, Texas, about 90 minutes outside of Dallas.
As I was just telling Tammy Bruce and her radio listeners, my wife and I thought it would be a fun place to spend Christmas, and it certainly is--but blogging may be at a reduced pace over the weekend.
The two breaking stories today are this truck crash, made more suspicious because of its cargo, and the Duke lacrosse case, with the D.A. dropping the main charge of rape. As I mentioned to Tammy, the timing of it--on a Friday afternoon, the weekend before Christmas--seems to imply that his office was attempting to minimize the damage to Mike Nifong's reputation as much as they possibly could.
Will the remaining two charges against the Duke players be dropped during another quiet period in the news cycle--say, the weekend before New Years? Or will Nifong continue to try to string this out as long as possible?
Tough to argue with Pajamas HQ's assessment of this video captioned by Scrappleface's Scott Ott:
I can't say that this is very surprising:
In a new Business & Media Institute analysis, “Good Morning America” was the least likely of the network morning shows to refer to Christmas, mentioning it only about 31 percent of the time.Breaking the spirit of Leftivus in the overculture is still an uphill struggle.While retailers were taken to task for celebrating a generic holiday last year and are instead marketing a very Merry Christmas this year, journalists have not joined the Christmas party.
After pressure last year from religious groups many retailers made changes this year to welcome the Christmas spirit. Wal-Mart, Kohl’s, Sears, Macy’s and Target are among the businesses recognizing Christmas this year, according to a November 30 article in the National Catholic Register.
But those in the media business are being much more Scroogelike. They preferred to use “holiday” or “season” when talking about Christmastime by a 3-1 margin between November 22-29, around the time the traditional Christmas shopping season began.
A breakdown of ABC’s “Good Morning America,” NBC’s “Today” show, and CBS’s “Early Show” resulted in nearly 300 references to the Christmas season during the week of November 22-29. Only 75 of them included the word “Christmas.” (The tally included only the comments made by reporters and anchors. Not included in the count were onscreen graphics or formal names.)
CBS’s “Early Show” mentioned “Christmas” the most often with 37.7 percent of the references being holiday-specific. NBC’s “Today” fell between ABC and CBS, saying “Christmas” 35.4 percent of the time.
"That baby born in the manger prevails. He must know someone pretty high up", Tammy Bruce writes.
Clive Davis asks, "A question for religiously-minded film fans: why is the new movie, The Nativity Story doing so badly when Mel Gibson’s version of The Passion did so well?"
Maybe because it didn't arrive with such incredible controversy, and with a media superstar associated with it. (Remember the early, strange stories that began emerging from the set that Mel was spending his own money to shoot a movie entirely in Aramaic? And then the firestorm the week of The Passion's release?)
All of that made The Passion go from being just another religious film to a cause celebre that everyone, pro or con, wanted to see to decide for themselves what the fuss was all about. And it sounds like Gibson is doing his damndest to recreate that same controversy with Apocalypto--even if the hype has little to do with the film itself, according to Michael Medved:
Perhaps Gibson is so eager to transcend the humiliation of his drunk driving incident, and to bury the lingering suspicions that “The Passion” (despite its huge commercial success) was a right-wing, hate-filled screed, that he’s saying stupid things that he believes will endear him to the “progressive” Hollywood establishment.Anti-American and anti-Semitic? Mel will really be bathed in the French Ego Juice!Clearly, the film (with dialogue in the ancient Yucatec language, with subtitles) represents a major risk and he needs great reviews to get the attention required for decent box office performance. By cooking up some preposterous lefty interpretation of Mayan collapse (is the big chieftain with the body scarring and the elaborate tattoos and the distended ears and the carved piece of jade in place of his nose supposed to represent George W. Bush?) Gibson may be trying to position his adrenalin-soaked, breathlessly paced chase picture as an “important, daring” message movie that indicts the U.S.
Even if there’s no basis whatever in the substance of the film for Mel’s alarmist, we’re-all-guilty-and-doomed commentary about US society, the attempt to fabricate a political subtext for a visceral, straight-ahead action-adventure may prove an effective strategy. The positioning of a relentlessly fast-moving thriller set in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula more than five hundred years ago as some searing, timely indictment of “over consumption” and “political corruption” in Bush-era USA, may force some high brow critics to take “Apocalypto” more seriously than they would without the pretentious preaching surround it’s release. There’s another advantage concerning the movie’s distribution overseas: Gibson’s comments will help to produce the warm reception in France that’s all-but-guaranteed for any work plausibly classified as anti-American.
Update: Thoughts on the film itself, here.
Television long ago replaced the fireplace as the central gathering place in the American home, which adds to the layers of McLuhanesque irony hidden in the annual Yule Log video. Fortunately, the spotlight shines even brighter on the world's most famous log this year, as The New York Daily News reports:
Generations have sat raptly in front of the television on Christmas Day, mesmerized by a holiday classic: "The Yule Log."Hopefully they'll put it up on YouTube in time for Christmas. In the meantime, the above clip should help get you in the mood, though you'll have to keep hitting play after its short run, rather than waiting for it to automatically loop.Now, for the first time in the storied log's 40-year history, secrets of the burning timber will be revealed.
WPIX/Ch. 11 presents "The WPIX Yule Log: A Log's Life," Dec. 23 at 7 p.m.
Or something like that--Ed Morrissey reviews The Nativity Story; Govindini Murty explains why it's so controversial in the Second City.
Mary Katharine Ham explores how we arrived at The Holiday That Dare Not Speak its Name:
James Lileks' Bleat from a couple of Christmases (oh no, he said it!) back is also worth reading for its historical perspective, as he rummaged through his newspaper's Christmas (he did it again!) archives over the course of the 20th century.
Update: It sounds like St. Albans, North Carolina has a particularly impressive Leftivus display this time of year.
...But you can't take him out of the actor who brought him to life so vividly, by making actor and character appear inseparable (not to mention insufferable). Danny DeVito, who hasn't had a hit movie since, arguably L.A. Confidential nearly a decade ago, really knows how to spread the holiday cheer in promoting his latest film, Deck The Halls:
Danny DeVito seemed drunk when he went on an anti-Bush tirade on ABC’s The View on Wednesday. DeVito recounted how he last visited the White House during the Clinton years, warmly noting that "the place was, had that kind of Clinton feeling, you know," before denigrating President Bush as "numb nuts" (or something like that — ABC bleeped over the last part of that word).Now that's how to sell a family-friendly Christmas movie to its Red State target audience!DeVito then began what was supposed to be mimicry of Bush, making a variety of weird sounds and facial expressions. It’s impossible to really capture DeVito’s performance in words (he’d admitted he’d been up partying all night with George Clooney), so I’ve posted a short video of one of his more explosive moments. [Click over to view the clips--Ed]
After his Bush-bashing, DeVito then asked the panel what they thought about "the hat trick last week — Rumsfeld, the House and the Senate," referring to the Democrats’ election victories and Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld’s stepping down. DeVito announced how he reacted to the news: "I took my clothes off."
The Chicago Tribune notes, "Stores revert to 'Merry Christmas'--Wal-Mart leads way, backing off from 'happy holidays'".
That's great to see, and it's a direct response to the amount of complaints that filtered up through the Blogosphere and online forums last year. It's also further proof of something that Jonah Goldberg wrote last year, which the midterms confirmed:
Galloping toward the center is nothing new in American politics. The parties have always regressed to the mean. The center of gravity is in the, uh, center. What's changed is that the center has — finally — been moving an eensy bit to the right.And perhaps it's also a small sign that the 1970s might be slowly--ever, ever so slowly--be receding into the distance.
Hopefully many more brick and mortar chains will follow suit. As I wrote last year, there's absolutely no excuse for any large Internet retailer for not doing this, of course.
Update: Mary Katharine Ham spots another difference between Christmas retailing this year and last.
Hey, at least he's finally come clean on the subject--and on The Tonight Show to boot. I have to give him points for that...
(Via Hot Air.)
Michael Ledeen takes the pulse of religious hatred amongst America's Blue State elites:
We’re living at a moment when hatred of religion and of religious groups is gathering momentum. Perhaps this is a reaction to the global religious revival that has been underway for two generations, but whatever its roots, it is now so common that hardly anyone notices (except, paradoxically, when it’s directed against Muslims). Some attention was given to the singularly intolerant action taken by the local regime in St. Paul, Minnesota, barring public displays of bunnies during the Eastern season. And then, to the near-total indifference of the journalistic hunting pack, in late March the San Francisco City Council, angered by Catholic opposition to gay adoption, unanimously approved a resolution that read:Read the whole thing.It is an insult to all San Franciscans when a foreign country, like the Vatican, meddles with and attempts to negatively influence this great city’s existing and established customs and traditions, such as the right of same-sex couples to adopt and care for children in need.One could almost see the torch flicker at John F. Kennedy’s gravesite across the Potomac, and one had a great impulse to yell very loudly in the fine words of Oriana Fallaci, who lies in pain in Manhattan, snarling back at the cancer that has taken over her body:How come that, in a country where 85 percent of the citizens say to be Christian, so few rebel to the ludicrous offensive which is going on against Christmas?!? How come that so few protest when your Caviar Left speaks about abolishing Christmas holiday, Christmas-trees, Christmas-songs, the same expressions Merry Christmas and Happy Christmas?!?That’s the sort of anger that comes from a self-described "religious atheist" like Oriana, who knows that if anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism spread again, it is only a matter of time before they will come for people like her.As indeed they have already, with their legal briefs and their anti-hate-speech codes, dragging her off to the latest version of the Inquisition for the sin of apostasy against the Church of Political Correctness. San Francisco, under cover of "existing and established customs and traditions," bans free speech. The little reichs of San Francisco, St. Paul, and Paris ban free religion. And "top professors" at Harvard and Chicago take off after the Jews.
No wonder Ayman al Zawahiri and his buddy, the Ayatollah Khamenei, think we’re going to be an easy prey.
Last year, we noted the left's attacks on Christmas and even Halloween. (Can't offend those sensitive Wiccans!)
Yet another traditional holiday with origins in Christianity is falling under attack: appropriately for February 14th, Registan, Charles Johnson, and Tim Blair look at Islam's war against Valentine's Day.
Google is impersonating Austin Power's Dr. Evil, according to the Riding Sun blog:
I can't seem to find the link for this one; I think it was on a Rooters website somewhere. But I just read a shocking news report: In the wake of its decision to censor its Chinese search results, Google is changing its corporate motto from the original "Don't be evil."With its customized splash page, Google is celebrating Chinese New Year today (as are my neighbors--a fair amount of fireworks have been going off since last night); too bad Christmas and Easter are considered passé by the Diet Coke of evil.The new motto, according to unnamed company sources, is: "Be semi-evil. Be quasi-evil. Be the margarine of evil. Be the Diet Coke of evil — just one calorie; not evil enough!"
Mary Katharine Ham and La Shawn Barber write about the very recent--as in 1966--origins of Kwanzaa. Ham describes a news story on Kwanzaa cut in half by an editor who decided it to play it as safe as the New York Times covering Woody Allen or John Kerry:
I was asked to do a story on a local Kwanzaa celebration when I worked at a newspaper a couple years ago. Between second grade and then, I had figured out that Kwanzaa was created about the same time as Nancy Sinatra's career. But I didn't know about Karenga until I started Googling.And another mile-marker on the road to the Blogosphere--and beyond.Then I found the Front Page Magazine article linked above, written by Paul Mulshine, a columnist for the Newark Star-Ledger. After I clicked on it, I almost wished I hadn't.
I had planned to do the dutiful, fluffy Kwanzaa story. I had planned a sprinkling of history, some winning photos of 6-year-olds, and quotes lauding the act of gourd-painting as a path to cultural awareness. I had it planned.
Paul Mulshine threw off my plan, and I knew I was in trouble. In trouble because I couldn't, in good conscience, leave all the bad stuff about [Ron] Karenga out of a story about the holiday he created. In trouble because I knew this would cause problems with my editors.
I called Mulshine, who was nice enough to do an interview with me and send me some of his sources, so that I could have some back-up when my editors asked me about it. I called Karenga and left a message on his machine, but never heard back from him.
I interviewed the teachers and students involved with the Kwanzaa celebration. I got all the gourd-painting quotes I needed, but I also asked what they knew about Karenga and his unsavory past. They knew nothing about it. I asked if they knew why Kwanzaa used Swahili terms when most American slaves came from thousands of miles away from anywhere Swahili was spoken. They didn't know. Many of them didn't know the holiday was created in California in 1966, just as I hadn't.
In the end, I compromised. I wrote 10 inches of fluffy holiday story. The childrens' Kwanzaa artwork was beautiful and deserved to be spotlighted, no matter what kind of man Karenga was. But I also wrote 10 inches on Karenga. Nothing too graphic. I didn't get into the specifics of the torture. I didn't list every one of his misdeeds. But I thought a little of that was important to the story, especially since it seemed no one knew anything about it.
The next day, I picked up the paper. My 20-inch story had become 10 inches long overnight. Can you guess which 10 inches they cut?
This paper never cut for space. It rarely edited a word I wrote. As a result, a 10-inch cut was conspicuous, to say the least. And indefensible. And in this case, expected.
My editor and I had a civil conversation about it, the conclusion of which was something along the lines of, "well, you just can't write stuff like that. Just because...you just can't."
Just another mile-marker in my journey out of the newspaper business.
Mary Catherine Ham looks at Google's riduculously subtle Non-Demoninational Winter Solstitial December 25th splash page greeting:
I'm going to get just a little "War on Christmas" on you. I didn't want to be bitter-blogger yesterday, so I left it alone, but did anyone see the Google logo yesterday? Here's what they gave us to commemorate the birth of Christ and the first day of Hannukah.Of course, Google could have let its users choose what they'd like to see on December 25th.As a friend of mine said, "because everyone knows the true meaning of Christmas is that cats and mice should work together to industrialize." Heh. Yep, I'm pretty sure that's in there-- Book of Jerry, Chapter 5. Look it up.
It's not that I'm angry about this, but I do feel like Google goes from looking sensitive to looking downright silly when it just pretends Christmas isn't there at all, while commemorating other holidays. Just silly.
Or, maybe they're just going for a really subtle "lion lay down with the lamb" thing. Very subtle.
Posting will no doubt be a bit sparse on Christmas day, and any posts on Sunday will appear under this one. In the meantime, let me take this opportunity to wish everyone:
This isn't the first year religious groups have taken on retailers who say "Happy Holidays'' instead of "Merry Christmas.'' But a retail analyst says it's been one of the angriest.Big business is never going to appease the left; it might as well try to please the majority of its customers.Britt Beemer, the chairman of the consumer research firm America's Research Group, says a growing number of consumers are aggravated when stores instruct their employees not to say "Merry Christmas.'' A survey by the group found that a quarter of those polled said they'd walk out of a store that gives the more neutral greeting. Those surveyed also say retailers aren't spending as much on lavish Christmas displays as they used to.
This year, the American Family Association gathered more than 500,000 signatures asking Target to include Christmas in its promotions. Stores such as Sears and Wal-Mart faced boycotts.
There's a very simple solution for online retailers, of course.
The congregation of First Emmanuel Baptist Church drove from Baton Rouge, Houston and other points far and wide on Christmas, then walked past collapsed buildings and piles of storm wreckage to worship in their old church for the first time since Hurricane Katrina.Incidentally, tomorrow is the one year anniversary of the much deadlier Indian Ocean tsunami."This means everything. We've come home," said Lila Southall, the minister's wife. "My house is gone but I'm still home for Christmas."
Update: "Asia marks one year to the day since tsunami hit, sweeping away 216,000 lives".
Two from the United Federation of Planets: first up, remember this one, from the early, funny years of Saturday Night Live?
And second, this was a geeky little bonbon I wrote for the last page of the December 2004 issue of Electronic House magazine:
Read More »
Mark Steyn has, I think, the definitive look at The War On Christmas, placed into the larger context of the left's War On Culture:
One December a few years back, I was in Santa Claus, Indiana, and went to the Post Office – a popular destination thanks to its seasonal postmark. “Merry Christmas!” I said provocatively.But Postmistress Sandy Colyon was ready for me. “A week ago,” she said, “I’d have had to say ‘Happy Holidays’, but we’ve been given a special dispensation from the Postmaster-General allowing us to say ‘Merry Christmas’. So Merry Christmas!”
That’s “Christmas” at the dawn of the third millennium – a word you have to get a special memo from head office authorizing the use thereof. In America, most executive honchos would rather not take the risk, instructing the staff to eschew any mention of the C-word in favour of “Happy Holidays!” – the all-purpose inoffensive greeting that covers Hannukah, Kwanzaa, Eid, the Third Wednesday after Ramadan, hippy-dippy solstice worship, West Bank Suicide Bomber Appreciation Day and any other festive occasion you’ve lined up for the general vicinity of late 2005/early 2006.
For US columnists, the end-of-year column bemoaning the fanatical efforts to expunge all Christmas traditions from public life has become an annual Christmas tradition in itself. And, happily, there’s no shortage of contenders for silliest Santa suit. Last Christmas, to pluck at random from just one state, the annual trip by one New Jersey school district to see Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” was cancelled after threats of legal action. At another New Jersey school, the policy on not singing any songs mentioning God, Christ, angels, etc, was expanded to prohibit instrumental performances of music that would mention God if any singers were around to sing the words. So you can’t do “Silent Night” as a piano solo or Handel’s Messiah even if you junk the hallelujahs.
But let’s not obsess on New Jersey’s litigious secularists. In Plano, Texas, in the heart of God-fearin’ Bush country, parents were instructed not to bring red and green plates and napkins for the school’s “winter” parties, as red and green are colours with strong Christmas connotations and thus culturally oppressive. In Massachusetts, in the heart of Bush-fearin’ country, the mayor of Somerville issued an apology for accidentally referring to the town “holiday party” as a C-------- party.
This year the Christmas crowd pushed back, complaining to Wal-Mart and other big retailers about what’s become a perversely ostentatious aversion to the C word. The malls still have to sell stuff which at least prevents them retreating too far into the more extreme manifestations of cultural self-abasement. At the average American schoolhouse, no such restraints exist and the average “holiday concert” is now an hour of torture for even the most self-consciously tolerant parents, forced to endure a mélange of cat-strangling multiculti dirges. Jesus, Mary and Joseph long ago got the heave-ho from the grade school, but the great secular trinity of Santa, Rudolph and Frosty aren’t faring much better. “Frosty The Snowman” and “Jingle Bells” are offensive to those of a non-Frosty or non-jingly persuasion: they’re code for traditional notions of Christmas. The basic rule of thumb is: Anything you enjoy singing will probably get you sued. At my children's school, like most others, the holiday concert’s “celebrate diversity” anthems are parceled out entirely randomly: one year you might get the Hannukah song, the next the traditional Hutu disemboweling chant. But the thing to remember is: it would be offensive to inflict “Deck The Halls” or “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” on any hypothetical Hutu in attendance, but it’s not offensive to inflict hot Hutu hits on bewildered moppets.
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In a rare Friday night/Saturday morning post (depending upon which time zone you'r