The Origin of the War on Christmas

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I’m thinking about switching to Chrome as my default browser, but first I need to check and see if I can still blog successfully using it. It’s not officially supported by MoJo’s tech staff, you see. So I need something to write about.

I know! How about the War on Christmas™? Dan Amira shares with us the video clip on the right, which is certainly amusing. It turns out that Fox News, which is ground zero for outrage over this stuff, airs house spots that wish everyone “Happy Holidays.” Hah!

But I have a question. The conservative take on all this is that “Happy Holidays” is some kind of secular leftist plot. Or a multi-culti plot. Or something. But at least as far back as when I was a kid, we got cards wishing us “Holiday Greetings” or “Greetings of the Season,” or some such. And since we were all one big Christian nation back then, and no one cared about Eid or Kwanzaa or atheists or even Hanukkah, really, I always assumed that this particular greeting was about New Year’s. “Happy Holidays” meant you were including both Christmas and New Year’s, not that you were including Christmas and some godless pagan festival.

Am I crazy? Or is that where it started?

POSTSCRIPT: In case you’re wondering, Chrome seems to work fine, as you can see by the fact that this post exists. Oddly, though, our (supposedly) WYSIWYG editor and preview function don’t display YouTube embeds in Chrome. In fact, this particular embed didn’t even show up when I published the post. Then after a few minutes it finally did. But even then, it still didn’t show up when I went back into editing mode. That’s pretty strange.

Everything else seems to work fine, though Chrome lacks some useful features I’ve gotten used to. But I guess that’s life.

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BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has always made clear what he thinks of journalists. And it’s plain now that his administration intends to do everything it can to stop journalists from reporting things they don’t like—which is most things that are true.

No one gets to tell Mother Jones what to publish or not publish, because no one owns our fiercely independent newsroom. But that also means we need to directly raise the resources it takes to keep our journalism alive. There’s only one way for that to happen, and it’s readers like you stepping up. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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