Author Richard Cahill's Website--Living By Our Motto:"There Are No Stupid Questions, Just Stupid People Asking Questions Everybody else already knows the answer to."

I have decided to suspend my personal War on Christmas. Not because my heart has grown ten sizes this day, because that hasn’t happened, and it would certainly be a serious health event if it did.
 
Nor have I ceased to regard the holiday as grinding waste of a season. The Mariah Carey-ness of it, the Hallmarki-ness of it, the crowd of people milling around under taxpayer provided municipal decorations, shoving each other out of the way to max out their credit cards, still annoys me. I would still happily sign up to be a Stocking Stealer or an Elf Eraser, if they advertised such callings on LinkedIn.
 
They don’t, so I have decided to wash my hands of the conflict. I will still walk dull-eyed by the television when my girl is watching another movie about a successful, pretty, yet vaguely unfulfilled, career woman finding a perfect man for her lurking in a picturesque New England town in the snow, although, if you go to a New England town in real life this time of year and it is snowing, all you will find  is a bunch of New Englanders getting crabby about having to get their snow blowers out of the garage before Thanksgiving.
 
Speaking of Thanksgiving, there’s a holiday that the Christmas season has nearly crushed into nonexistence. In my childhood, it was regarded as almost equally important. Sure, it was only four days off school instead of seven, but one of those days was spend tracing crayons around our hands to make crayon turkeys that our parents had to hang up on the fridge, so it was really five. Even as a young man, it seemed a festive time of gorging food and drink and watching endless football games.
 
Now it’s barely an afterthought. Bounce a few giant turkey balloons off skyscrapers and watch football all you want, but the holiday is now just a prelude to Black Friday, where the deadly serious shoppers of America pack saps and switchblades, to fight off others of their kind craving flat-screen TVs at 70% off. And, in truth, I see why. There’s only so many turkeys to sell and hours in a day to watch sports. Attractive people don’t fall in love while they’re stuffing themselves with pie, and even Mariah can’t sing while she’s cramming biscuits down her throat.
 
No, it’s all the same every year, mall Santas, annoying carolers and grandma getting run over by a reindeer again and again on the CVS soundtrack. Starbucks will put something Satanic on its Christmas cups and wait eagerly, like a child anticipating Christmas dawn, for the good Christians of America to notice it and start their annual boycott up again.
 
I have decided to step back from the conflict. I will just steel myself against its worst offenses, and wait patiently until January, when dull winter skies and short days depress a nation worried about its weight, its livers and its credit card debit. Spring seems horrifyingly far off, and the next Christmas is so far over the horizon it might as well be Europe.
 
It’s the most wonderful time of the year.

The downing of two “unknown” objects over the far north has raised a question that, so far, that our cowardly politicians and mealy-mouthed military have failed to answer.
 
Are we shooting at Santa?
 
Those among the captive media who pooh-pooh this hypothesis by pointing out that it has been almost two months since Christmas, when Kris Kringle is sure to take to the Arctic skies, must be reminded of the North Pole’s need to maintain its preparedness for the holiday season. The popular view of Santa gorging himself on milk and cookies and cuddling with Mrs. Claus for all but one night a year is obviously a carefully cultivated image. Flying sleighs must be rigorously spot-checked. Just because they are magical does not mean they are not subject to maintenance schedules and fluid changes. They may very well have to be flown on a regular basis. And there may be more than one.
 
Not only the sleigh, but the reindeer must be kept in shape. Do you expect these small northern ungulates to pull a sleigh full of toys and goodies around the entire planet once a year if they spend the rest of it lounging around eating candy canes with elves and polar bears? Hell, no. They have to be worked into a lather at frequent intervals. The efforts of a thoroughbred at a racetrack are nothing compared to the stupendous mission of Donner, Blitzen, Rudolph, et al, on Christmas Eve.
 
The authorities have kept this pretty buttoned up, but several ominous clues have emerged. One is that the mystery objects shot down were said to be “car -size.” Well, “car-size” is about the same as “sleigh-size,” isn’t it?
 
The other is that the downed objects “did not appear to have surveillance equipment.” Bullshit. He knows when you’ve been sleeping. He knows when you’re awake. This is obviously a cover-up.
 
Be prepared for never seeing photos of the downed “objects,” because they are probably gruesome tableaus of fragments of a red suit trimmed in white fur scattered across the icy wilderness, together with a pitiful debris field of dolls, toy trains and Legos, a “test payload” of next year’s holiday season’s giving.
 
But all cover-ups collapse eventually. I don’t like Joe Biden’s re-election chances, though, if he has to stand before the nation and say the words no American wants to hear:
​
“There is no Santa Claus.”

A live Nativity scene on a North Carolina island was ruined when several cows who were scheduled to perform in it ran away rather than share the stage with Baby Jesus.
 
The rationalist herd animals stayed for sixteen hours up to their fetlocks in the waters of the Cape Fear River rather than return to the company of Mary and Joseph. They were eventually rounded up by the local police department, aided by a K-9 police dog with “specialized herding skills.”
 
Asked to speculate on why the cows didn’t want to be stabled with the rest of the Nativity burros, pigs and chickens, the local chief of police said, “Well, we think it wasn’t the Wise Men. They were told to keep their frankincense and myrrh tightly closed, because barnyard animals aren’t used to those kinds of smells. And our Mary wasn’t actually a virgin, but neither were the cows, so I don’t see how that could have bothered them.
 
“It might have been the Little Drummer Boy. A lot of cows don’t care for percussion instruments.
 
“But my best guess is they were just atheist cows, sticking up their noses at the God-fearing citizens of North Carolina. The Nativity scene owners just accidentally selected a few cows that harbored blasphemy in their udders. We have vast herds of good Christian cattle in our state, I’m sure. It was unfortunate that these nonbelieving Herefords were picked to moo lullabies at the Christ Child instead of some more respectful representatives of the dairy industry.
 
“Or it could just be the War on Christmas. I guess the atheists won that this year, thanks to those God-damn cows.”

Christmas is in peril this year, and not from the eternal War on Christmas, which I always try to actively participate in, but which always seems to come up short of victory. Whatever cool pagan design Starbucks puts on their Xmas cups this year, however many people say “Happy Holidays” to perturbed Evangelicals, and whatever number of customers are disturbed that their mall features a non-Caucasian Santa, the danger to Christmas this year is far bigger than any of that. It’s existential.
 
The toy your kid wants is still sitting on a dock in China.
 
Your Uncle Joe realizes this is a problem. By next election, he knows you’ll have forgotten about Afghanistan. Covid-19 will have been banished, which means the economy will zip back. Gas prices will slip downwards, because they always do.
 
But if your kid doesn’t get the Magic Mixies Critter Cauldron or the Squishmallow Frog Prince* he or she wants this year because they’re all still stuffed into a container ship off of Long Beach, you’re going to remember that come election time, mostly because your kid will remind you of it every day until next Christmas.
 
This is a problem and, like a Democrat, Joe Biden is trying to solve it. He’d better, because Fox has already labeled the issue “Joe Biden’s supply chain,” as if Biden had spent his life managing the worldwide network of ships, ports, trucks and trains that gets stuff from the people who make it to the people who want it, before taking a little break from that to be President. Here’s a nice interview with an executive from Walmart, a behemoth corporation that pays minimum wage as often as it possibly can, blaming the “labor shortage” for our supply chain woes and calling for Biden to fix it by finding more people who want to work for $7.50 an hour.
 
Tucker Carlson, on the other hand, thinks that the supply chain problem exists because the Secretary of Transportation is gay.
 
Biden’s solution is a disgustingly Democratic one, meaning it addresses the problem and has an outside chance of working. He ordered every port to be open 24/7 and every stevedore and truck driver in the country work overtime so that Christmas can be delivered.

For me this means that the Amazon, UPS and Fed-Ex trucks that already ram ceaselessly around my sleepy suburban neighborhood, endangering my elderly neighbors out for their evening totters, will increase in both speed and number, soon in the dark, so that it won’t be safe to step off a curb until December 26.
 
But Joe knows what he’s doing. If people can’t go into credit card debt until next November so that their tykes’ faces glow under the Christmas tree, if they can’t throw lefts and rights at each other at Target on Black Friday, if Jeff Bezos can’t make enough extra billions in Christmas cash so he can launch all of us into space, why, it wouldn’t be Christmas at all.
 
And don’t try that birth-of-Christ, all-men-living-in-peace-and-brotherhood for one day a year, sleep-in-heavenly-peace crap on me. Christmas is about commerce, naked greed and transforming our kids into even bigger bottomless pits of needs and wants than they are the rest of the year. If you could magically remove all of the cash out of Christmas, hardly anybody would pay attention to it. It would be celebrated by a small minority of Americans, while the rest of us would barely be aware of its existence.
 
Shit, it would be Hanukkah.

*Real toys. Google them if you don't believe me.

In the stream-of-incoherency that passes for national leadership nowadays, it would be easy to miss Second Son Eric Trump’s claim last week that his dad had “literally saved Christianity.” Easy to miss, because Eric was chirping it in the North Dakota hinterlands while his dad was being Mussowheezy, gasping Covid particles over a small crowd that was paid to expose themselves to him on the White House lawn.
 
“So what?” I hear you say. “Lots of people smarter than Eric Trump, which is almost every English-speaking person on the planet, have misused the word ‘literally.”
 
True dat. I mean, people have literally saved Christianity—Charles Martell did it in 732 AD by defeating the Moors in the Battle of Tours, thereby keeping Muslim hordes from invading France. If the noble Frank hadn’t won that battle, Charlotte McKinney would be spending her whole life wearing a chador, which would be a tragic waste of bikini-modeling talent. There probably would have been a couple of other effects, too.
 
But Trump hasn’t saved Christianity, literally, figuratively or metaphorically. America would remain vibrantly Jesusy with or without the Caucasian-in-Chief. I mean, he’s not saving it from Joe Biden, who is as Catholic an old guy as ever shook a pedophile priest’s hand after Mass. He’s not saving the Catholics, period, because the One True Church proved it knows how to hunker down and survive a plague back in the Dark Ages.
 
No, the Christianity he’s saving is the Church of We Won’t Bake Gay Wedding Cakes or Let You Get an Abortion After Your Uncle Fucked You. People wouldn’t pay near as much attention to that congregation if Trump wasn’t President. Also, people wouldn’t pay attention to Eric Trump at all, knowing that if he didn’t have the Secret Service to protect him during his travels to North Dakota, Eric would probably stumble off into the prairie and get stampeded by a herd of buffalo.
 
But, on a more gracious note, we would like to formally welcome Melania Trump into the ranks of we who War on Christmas. Before the first shot of this year’s War has been fired, which is traditionally the issuance of the Starbuck’s pagan holiday cup, the First Lady was overheard shouting our battle cry, FUCK CHRISTMAS!
 
Melania hates the holidays because she has to decorate the White House for it, and has been roundly criticized in the past for her efforts in doing so. Not without reason. But one look at her husband, even clothed, should be enough to convince any observer that Melania has terrible taste. She should no more be forced to decorate anything than Danny DeVito should be forced to do the high jump.
 
But, whatever their reasons for enlisting, we welcome any new recruits into the War on Christmas. We’re excited for it, because this might be the year we finally win out.
 
Because this year, it’s going to be A Very Covid Christmas. Ask the Hallmark Channel, if you don’t believe me.

We’ve just endured another Christmas season, and as our little ones fall into light, post-gift depressions and our contemporaries stuff themselves with cookies that they vow to burn off at the gym in 2020, it’s time for atheists to make a resolution themselves—to band together and create our own Christmas traditions so we can annoy our believer neighbors as much as they annoy us.
 
A friend of mine (he had been drinking) said a few days ago, “When are they going to get rid of this Christmas shit?” and was unhappy with my answer, which was, “Long after we are both dead. Give me your car keys.”
 
Christmas isn’t going anywhere. Here’s a link to a Slate article by a Muslim writer who bitches about how difficult American Christmas is for Muslims, to which all of us shrug and say, “Why don't you make your life easier by just quitting being a Muslim?”
 
First off, let’s keep Christ in Christmas. I hear you howling, my peeps, but hear me out. On Atheist Christmas Eve, Jesus circles the globe on his magical Christmas Cross, bring toys to all the good little rationalist children of the world. We’ll sing little songs about him:

He sees you when you're sleeping
He knows when you're awake
He knows when you've been bad or good
And when you masturbate!
 
Then, when your kids are around 11, you can tell them, “Jesus doesn’t really exist,” and mean it sincerely, killing two birds with one stone.
 
Decorating our homes with the atheist A and blowing up balloon Baphomets to place on our lawns gives neighborhood decoration admirers a nice break from Santa, Frosty and Rudolph and us an equal chance to be apprehensive about our January electric bill.
 
Caroling should be limited to singing satirical melodies. People who are sick of random Christians showing up at their doors, belting out “We Three Kings” and expecting cookies in return, are bound to feel refreshed by the song stylings of groups of random atheists harmonizing on “National Brotherhood Week,” and give them beer.
 
Adults should only gift each other with alcoholic beverages or where legal, cannabis products.
 
We’ll sink into a bloated, buzzed stupor just like our Christian neighbors around 7 and tune into the Atheist Christmas Channel, a cable network where the Grinch keeps Christmas, Rudolph’s red nose is diagnosed as a nasty case of rosacea, and Charlie Brown experiences existential angst when Peppermint Patty lets slip that the little red-haired girl is her lover.
 
And then it will all be over for another year. Ho, ho, ho, everybody.  

Christmas comes at the end of the busiest time of year at my day job, so, apart from an occasional snappy essay, I don’t personally war on it much. Fantasies about being a Stocking Stealer, or an Elf Eraser aside, I just don’t have the time. It would be swell if Christmas and I could just exist in separate bubbles whose surfaces never touch. Truthfully, I come close to that—I’m a rationalist, my girl is Jewish, my mother lives in Pennsylvania and my son in Australia. Christmas requires little effort on my part. I deck no halls and hang no balls.
 
But Christmas makes itself impossible to ignore. One trip to CVS and you’re likely to come home with not only some useless homeopathic cure and a receipt longer than your boss’s Tesla, but a nasty Christmas earworm, some loathsome old Yuletide tune that your brain plays over and over again, maddening you until you lull your marbles to sleep with alcohol or a nice fattie.
 
That exact thing happened in our household over the weekend, as my main squeeze returned from shopping with a crippling case of Holly Jolly Christmas, a particularly treacly tune sung by Burl Ives, an avuncular old bastard who sang it for the last time in 1995. Despite his death, his Christmas carol lives on, infesting my brain like a prionic disorder, an Xmas version of mad cow disease, because I promptly caught it from her.
 
Unlike a normal illness, catching a Christmas earworm can be done over and over again. The girl and I transmitted Holly Jolly Christmas back and forth for days. Just when my gray matter had gone quiet and the sappy strains of Ives’ jingle had been stilled by my better neurons, or at least been replaced by a non-Noel song (the Muppet version of Don’t Fence Me In is one of my brain’s favorites) she would wander by humming the obvious thing, and I would be infected once more.
 
It could be worse--All I Want for Christmas Is You comes to mind, which I sincerely wish it wouldn’t. My girl and I quarantined ourselves from the rest of the neighborhood so the infection wouldn’t spread. To pass the time, and to keep Burl from yodeling in our skulls, we decided to come up with new names for the penis fish. This species had just made itself noticeable by suffering a mass stranding in Northern California. Neither she nor I had ever heard of it before, but it struck us both as immediately in need of a re-naming.
 
“How about Pecker Trout?”
 
“I think Schlong Bass.”
 
“Or Erection Eel.”
 
“One-Eyed Perch?”
 
“Haliboner!”
 
“Call them what you want, but they’re no doubt great bait for tuna.”
 
And so on. It was not the most uplifting conversation for two educated adults, but it kept Burl at bay. But any relief you get from a Christmas earworm is bound to be short lived.
 
I hear Grandma got run over by a reindeer.

​It’s that time of year again, and while all us Grinches are bitching about the shitty Christmas song soundtrack at CVS and the traffic around the mall, families with young children are wondering what to wad under the tree to satisfy their children's bloated expectations for the holiday.
 
The online store Keep and Bear has the answer—a Lego type kit that enables your right-wing kid to build a toy wall to keep refugees away from our border.
 
The Wall comes with a two-inch figure of Trump, which the eager conservative lad can place in front of his completed Wall. The model Trump is stern and unsmiling, because there is no little plastic Putin that comes with the kit. There are also no little plastic rapists, let alone little plastic refugees with even littler plastic babies in their arms, which would make the Wall a tad more exciting.
 
Which is crucial, because a wall lacks thrills. Even the most adorably reactionary little one wants a present that he (and we say “he” purposely—little right-wing girls belong bent over their Easy-Bake Ovens) can pick up and play with. If he really wanted a Wall, he could build one out of the Legos he already has, and beg for 15,000 toy soldiers to station behind it. He’d rather have a Lego F-35 that he can swoop around his bedroom, making little machine-gun noises as he pretends to strafe liberals. Or even a Batcave, or Harry Potter’s castle, or any other Lego monstrosity that, once just one piece  from it chooses to work itself loose to bury itself like a little land mine in your carpet, completely loses all of its charm.
 
The Wall needs more action if it’s going to sell. Some pretend barbed wire for the top, and an imaginary terrorist that your little redneck-in-the-making can tangle in it, and a Lego waterboard for when he’s captured. Or a companion model set, like almost all Lego sets have—Kids in Cages! Or a plastic bus full of illegal aliens rushing off to vote illegally, with a little plastic George Soros as the bus driver.
 
Even then, though, this column has its doubts about political presents under the tree. The left wing has wisely refrained from politicizing toys—there is no Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez doll that little feminists can dress in cheap clothes, or Bernie Sanders bunny slippers. No matter what you give your loveable little racist for Christmas, one thing is almost for certain.
 
He’ll end up playing with the box.

My S.O. and I recently received the first award we have gotten as a couple. She gets awards by herself all the time, because she is a respected academic, so it is particularly gratifying for me to get this letter of congratulations, both because I never get awards for anything, and that the bestowing of this honor upon us is entirely my doing.

This award is for our Christmas decorating scheme, which consisted of a single string of Christmas lights tacked across our patio cover. I found the lights while cleaning out the garage, and hung them up at her insistence (So she deserves some credit, I guess). They are only half Christmas lights. The other half are Hanukkah lights, shaped like little dreidels. You have to get pretty close to see that, though, and it means walking across a frequently watered lawn in order to do so. We’ll never know if the awards committee got close enough to take that into consideration, and whether it had an effect on their decision. In any case, the lights' appearance of being Christmasy, instead of ecumenical, is probably protecting us from the alt-right.

Neither one of us knows why we deserve this award over our neighbors, many of whom have much grander displays. A substantial number of them spent entire weekends and buckets of nails wrapping their entire dwellings in Christmas lights, creating high-wattage displays that burn Christmas into the retina. I am sure they are disappointed and resentful at our grabbing the local Oscar of holiday ornamentation from underneath their noses.

The Hanukkah lights are appropriate, because my S.O. is Jewish. I am not sure about the others, because I am not Christian, but they don’t make atheist lights with a little “A” glowing in them, that I know of. I don’t even know if I would decorate with them if they did, because I am more of an apathetic agnostic. I certainly wouldn’t put little “AA” lights all over the patio, though, because that would remind me of those meetings people sometimes say I ought to go to.

Also of the size battery we most frequently run out of.

This season of Santa is now officially over, and while I have said before in these pages that the only difference between Santa and Jesus is that, eventually, your parents have to tell you that there is no Santa, I am not sure that is the best way to raise children. Perhaps we should give children the choice, at a certain age, to decide if they want to continue believing in either Santa or Jesus. Those that chose faith in Santa may have an easier time of it in adulthood. They may try earnestly to be good and worthy of the gifts they have begged for all season, but there will be that one, but only one, morning a year when they have to wake up to the realization that all is ashes, that they have disappointed their Deity despite all their efforts to behave, and they deserve nothing.

Whereas, if you chose Christianity, you can feel that bummed out every single day.

All hail Santa!