I love a Christmas Rant in the morning...

[shipperx]

Sometimes I'm amused by the strangest things.  For instance, I read a blog rant this morning and found myself oddly amused: 

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This story combines three of my least favorite things—Fox News, Sarah Palin and the War on Christmas—so I'm already breaking into hives just thinking about it. But here goes.  Via Mother Jones, the serious reporting of Some Guy at Fox News:

The official White House holiday card makes no mention of the word ‘Christmas’ and instead focused on Bo the First Dog based on the wishes of the First Family. [...]

The front of the card features Bo the First Dog lounging by a fireplace. Holiday greenery is draped over the fireplace mantle. Holiday presents are placed on a table underneath a poinsettia – instead of a Christmas tree.

Los Angeles-based artist Mark Matuszak told the LA Times that he was asked to create the card by the White House social secretary.

“They wanted to do an inside shot, something home related,” Matuszak told the newspaper. He said one of the ideas was to focus on the Obama’s family dog. “So we thought, let’s put Bo in front of a fireplace.”

Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin told Fox News & Commentary that she found the card to be a bit unusual.

“It’s odd,” she said, wondering why the president’s Christmas card highlights his dog instead of traditions like “family, faith and freedom.”

“Even stranger than that was his first year in office when the Christmas ornaments included Chairman Mao,” Palin said. “People had to ask that it be removed because it was offensive.”

All right, we're just going to toss out that last sentence. Go look it up on Google, if you want. I'm not touching it, because revisiting that would likely result in me driving a railroad spike into one or both eyeballs, just to dull the pain. Let's talk about the rest of it.

The premise here is that, after first being too Christmas-loving, now this card is not Christmas-laden enough. To you or I it may look like Thomas Kinkade ate a box of candy canes and pooped out a tranquil interior scene, but to the forces of Christmas Outrage it is deeply suspicious because there is a dog in the scene when there should have been a Jesus, and there is a poinsettia instead of a Christmas tree, and there's just something off about it, in their minds. A suspicious number of books, perhaps, or maybe one of the chairs is facing towards Mecca. I don't know, because I am not fucking insane.

I am now going to enumerate just a few reasons why this line of attack is, indeed, quite gleefully insane. If there is ever a court hearing to decide whether Sarah Palin or Some Guy at Fox News should be committed for the safety of themselves and others, I shall submit all of this as evidence.

First: White House Christmas cards that do not feature the human inhabitants of the White House are historically commonplace. This is for a host of reasons; leaving politics out of it would be one. You can imagine what the above scene would look like if President Obama was in it: Oh my goodness! How dare the fellow politicize the season by, you know, being in his own White House Christmas card! (As that last link shows, putting politicians in holiday greeting cards is fraught with peril.)

Second: Let us examine what other major institutions deem to be appropriate cards for the season. Institutions such as, let us say, Fox News itself, the perpetrator of this newest challenge to all our sanity via ginned-up (emphasis on gin, here) seasonal outrage. The Fox News card this year shows an anthropomorphic fox (get it?) winning a sheep-driven sled race over fellow participants ABC, NBC and CBS. There are no Christmas trees: The only decoration is a bit of holiday bunting.

Now, if this does not scream "family, faith and freedom" to you, then you would presumably be correct. No doubt the inside of the card is chock full of holiday messages like "I love Jesus" and "Merry Christmas or go to hell," but I question the sincerity of Some Guy at Fox News having a well-choreographed cow over the depiction of an animal on a holiday greeting card, or of Sarah Palin wondering at the terrible unusualness of said cards, when everybody knows official Christmas cards have to have pictures of your family holding Second Amendment-sanctioned firearms while giving a group hug to the baby Jesus in a nativity scene painted by Norman Rockwell's better, more faith-oriented cousin.

Not to be outdone, the Fox Business card features two anthropomorphic foxes roasting the dead, plucked and skewered NBC peacock over an open fire. The cartoonish murder of your perceived enemies? Now that's the Christmas spirit! Or it would be, if there were any Christmas trees.

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Heh. 

Now, personally, I would've gone with pointing out that the holiday tradition of bringing greenery indoors pre-dates Christianity and has pagan origins.  It's a pagan tree! :P 

(BTW, I noticed that most if not all of the the 'pre-Christian' part of holiday greenery is being edited out of wiki  (similar to the whole "Paul Revere warned the BRITISH!" incident). Why do people believe that history can be re-written for the convenience of  political hobby horses of right this very minute? )

Christianity adopted, repackaged, and repurposed lots of pagan symbols while converting various cultures.  There are lots of pre-Christian symbols wrapped up in it.  Look up the goddess Eostre for instance if you ever wonder where the term "Easter" came from (or why a bunny was associated with it) or the birthdate of Mithra if you ever wondered about December 25th (this is also a factor in the halo, both Mithra and Apollo... who also got his halo from Mithra).

Comments

[petzipellepingo.livejournal.com]

Christianity adopted, repackaged, and repurposed lots of pagan symbols while converting various cultures. There are lots of pre-Christian symbols wrapped up in it

Hell, I have a pre-WW1 Christmas card in German with a swastika on it. Because, of course, that's a pre-Christian symbol that had nothing to do with the Nazis until decades later.

[rahirah]

Roughly 50% of the Christmas cards out there have cute animals on them. I think most of the cards we sent out last year and this year have birds sitting on frozen holly branches or something. Guess all the card companies are run by anti-Christmas guerrillas....

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

You should just do what we do and celebrate the birth of bouncing baby Thor Jesus by sacrificing a giant goat. :)

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

I think we ritually sacrifice a pig... and dip his ham in salt, brown sugar, and honey then spiral cut it. :)

[nutmeg3.livejournal.com]

I've got it! I'm going to design my own card for next Christmas, and it's going to feature Jesus roasting Sarah Palin over an open fire, and hoping that next year people will get back to paying attention to his teachings and stop taking his name in vain.

Also...

[fenderlove.livejournal.com]

Every time someone screams at me for keeping the fun at Halloween because it is a "pagan holiday," I like to remind them where their oh-so-"Christian" holidays came from. Why can't everyone just have a nice time without worrying about what other people are doing this time of year? Stay out of the cold, eat a lot of awesomely bad-for-you things, and be thankful that the earth hasn't been sucked into a black hole. XD

[wildrider.livejournal.com]

Was reading a terrific article the other day about how the founders of America did NOT, in fact, celebrate Christmas because it was a horrid Pagan holiday that venerated booze and debauchery and was celebrated by the hated British. I bet that's something Sarah Palin doesn't want to know.

America didn't embrace Christmas as it stands today until the early part of the 19th century -- and then mostly only in the South. The North (Puritans) didn't celebrate the pagan holiday... (it wasn't a National Holiday until 1870.)