Happy Holidays is an all-inclusive vision of hell, a card-carrying ACLU-supporting tofurkey-eating Kwanzaa-colored dystopia. A vortex of postmodern chaos, it can mean anything: shoot, Osama Bin Laden can have Happy Holidays sitting in a dark cave, with no tree or tinsel or Johnny Mathis records or anything.
But ah, Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas is a sentiment to set your cash register jing-jing-jingling. Merry Christmas is where Ebenezer Scrooge got the true spirit and started spending some of that bankroll, am I right? Merry Christmas sounds like America: get it? A-merry-ca! Merry Christmas really is like a picture frame by Currier and Ives, crossed with a full-color catalog by Abercrombie and Fitch. Merry Christmas summons up a fair-haired, blue-eyed, Fox News watching paradise, in the tradition of great Christmas-loving Americans like Irving Berlin and Jules Rankin. Most of all, Merry Christmas really rubs it in the face of Jews and Moslems and Ethical Humanists and other infidels.
And goodness knows, merriness is the supreme value of the Christian religion. As in those famous verses, "Blessed are the merry"... "Be merry unto your neighbor as thou wouldst have him be merry unto you"... "God saw what he had done and said that it was merry"... and on and on.
"Always look on the bright side of life." Jesus met his painful, humiliating death with the right attitude -- a merry attitude. (Unlike Graham Chapman, I'm sure, who met his end with a gay attitude, and not in the nice old-fashioned sense but in the modern filthy diseased abomination sense.)
Long live the Church of the All-American Merry Christmas, and our pope, Bill O'Reilly, and his disciples, deployed all over the nation as Wal-Mart greeters.
UPDATE: New York Times: "Religious conservatives have a cause this holiday season: the commercialization of Christmas. They're for it."
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