Just two years ago, we heard much about the “War on Christmas,” and as nearly as I can tell, it has been about as successful as the wars on poverty and drugs. In other words, Christmas won.
“Merry Christmas” appears in the television advertising of various big-box stores. The lights of “the world’s largest Christmas tree decoration” on Tenderfoot Hill above Salida were turned on, complete with fireworks, at a community celebration a few days ago. For the first time in memory, the rental house next door even has strings of Christmas lights on its front-yard trees.
Or perhaps they aren’t really Christmas lights. They all glow white, and from what I’ve read out of Fort Collins lately, red and green lights are wholesome Christmas symbols, but little twinkling white lights represent a generic winter festival promoted by the Secular Humanist Worldwide Alliance of Political Correctness Opposed to Traditional Values.
I thought of asking my neighbor just why she chose to display white lights, but that seemed too simple. Instead, I started looking for whoever was behind the War on Christmas.
It took a while, but I finally found Endicott Scrooge, managing general partner of Megaglobal Capital Management, the corporate descendant of the 19th-century London firm of Marley & Scrooge.
He explained that he was the great-great-great-great-grandnephew of Ebeneezer Scrooge, one of the company’s founding partners. “Uncle Eben never married,” Endicott said, “after Belle, his true love, got tired of waiting for him. But he had a younger brother, Jeroboam, who took over the company after Ebeneezer had that famous nervous breakdown, and I’m descended from Jeroboam.”
“Ebeneezer had a nervous breakdown?” I asked. “I don’t think I know what you’re talking about.”
“Of course you do,” Endicott said. “Charles Dickens wrote about it in 1843. That night Uncle Eben said he saw three ghosts, then started giving his stuff away the next day? Believe it or not, he signed the firm up to pay the medical bills of that Cratchit cripple. He could have bankrupted the company.”
That did sound serious. “You’re telling me it was a sign of insanity when Ebeneezer started saying ‘Merry Christmas’ instead of ‘Bah, humbug?’ ” I asked.
“What else could you call it?” Endicott replied. “Poor Uncle Eben just snapped, and it was a good thing that Grandpa Jeroboam could ease him out of the company and step in to take over. The firm has survived and thrived for generations.”
“And all those years you’ve been waging the War on Christmas?” I asked.
“More or less,” he conceded, “but remember, we didn’t start it. When Oliver Cromwell and his Puritans took control of England in 1645, they outlawed Christmas because they saw it as decadent revelry. The Pilgrims of New England felt the same way. They also waged war on Christmas — it was banned in Boston from 1659 to 1681.”
“But that was a long time ago,” I pointed out. “What are you doing today to war against Christmas?”
“For one thing,” Endicott explained, “we’ve invented two new holidays to take people’s minds off the message of Christmas. The day after Thanksgiving is now “Black Friday,” and it involves a pilgrimage to a shopping mall while the national media focus on retail sales figures. More recently, we have “Cyber Monday” to celebrate online retailing.”
“Pretty clever,” I said. “And that takes people’s minds off ‘Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men’ “?
“Peace and good will are bad for our investment business — oil futures, commodity hedges, defense stocks,” Endicott said. “So of course we continue to fight the War on Christmas.”
Ed Quillen (ed@cozine.com) is a freelance writer, history buff and publisher of Colorado Central Magazine in Salida.
