Brood of Grinches

I’ve always loved Christmas and always will.

Not wanting to contribute to what in recent years has become a rising tide of rancor over a holiday that is supposed to herald exactly the opposite, I held off on this one until after the New Year. But before we get too far past the moment…

As I was driving to work a few days before Christmas, I spotted this sticker on a back windshield:

MERRY CHRISTMAS
Extinction threatened

Oh, please.

For another year, we’ve found ourselves in the awesome presence of the relentlessly righteous (just ask them), fierce and fearless defenders of something that doesn’t need defending.

Except, perhaps, from the likes of them. If anything threatens to kill Christmas, it’s these damn people.

This tiresome and obnoxious surge of Christmas fascism (in a rational world, that would be an oxymoron) is becoming something of a holiday tradition, and it’s one I’d personally like to see go the way of cigarette commercials and “The Little Drummer Boy.”

(Yes, I know “The Little Drummer Boy” is still around. But this is, after all, a season of hope.)

We’re now subjected yearly to a horde of humorless, clueless, forbearance-challenged Bible-clutchers who spend every December policing the culture to make sure the season conforms to their creed, and denouncing as a “War on Christmas” anything and everything that doesn’t -- including harmlessly cheerful secular salutations that have been around for years.

Did you feel spiritually renewed by every dutiful “Merry Christmas” on the lips of store clerks? Or did you suspect some not-so-subtle bullying of, and by, the lords of commerce?

Surely that’s just what Jesus had in mind.

The scowling sanctimony of the spiritually superior has always been with us, and always will be. John the Baptist called them a “brood of vipers,” those folks whose self-serving public piety is for the eyes and ears of other human beings.

Now they’ve taken to getting especially venomous in the holiday season, and accusing other people of stealing Christmas.

Nobody stole ours. If theirs is missing, the evidence points to an inside job.