Christmas wishes

Merry Christmas to all of our readers (including the haters)!

I’ve been meaning to write something this week, but for me, as with many of you, the week before Christmas has been jam packed with both work and personal commitments. The final business days of the year combined with last-minute gift-buying, wrapping, and other preparations to celebrate the holidays.

I’m told that it’s safe to say “Merry Christmas” again. Many of us never stopped. I’ll explode a myth by pointing out that Joe Biden, a longtime Christian, publicly wished the country a Merry Christmas as well.

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The whole “war on Christmas” was contrived. “Happy Holidays” is not anti-Christmas, but it is all-encompassing. The word “holiday” is short for “holy day,” and the phrase both includes a wish for a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year as well as holiday greetings to those American who don’t celebrate Christmas but who may have other winter holidays.

Like Jews. MAGA veers wildly between support for Israel, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and totally forgetting that the Jews that they alternately defend and attack celebrate Hanukkah rather than Christmas.

I celebrate Christmas as a memorial to the birth of Jesus Christ, the messiah and the risen king, but this Christmas, with ICE persecuting the downtrodden and poor, let’s take a moment to remember that America is a pluralistic society. The majority of us are at least nominally Christian, but that’s not a requirement. Nor should it be.

Christianity is about making a choice to repent and follow Jesus. It’s about changing your heart, and that inward change cannot be forced. It’s about merciful to “the least of these.”

Christmas is about peace, hope, and love. It isn’t about deportations, as a series of DHS memes would have you believe, or forcing others to bend to your will. Immigration laws were different back then, but the folks who point to Jesus’s family as indigent refugees have a point. Attempting to force “biblical” rules on unwilling people in a pharisaical manner is going to be counterproductive.

I’ve veered off into chasing a rabbit here, but my hope for the new year is that all of us will become less religious and more Christlike rather than following Herod’s example. Love your neighbors, love foreigners, turn the other cheek, and respond to wrath with a soft answer. Even if you choose not to follow Christ as a savior, you can follow his example and the country will be better for it.

Most Americans don’t like what we see happening here, and I’m hopefully confident that 2026 will bring a strong rebuke for the Trump Administration’s excesses and incompetence. But how America responds will be the difference between a velvet revolution and a violent one.

“Pray for peace, people, everywhere.”

I’ll be traveling a lot over the holidays, so this will probably be my last new post of the year unless there’s some big breaking news that I feel compelled to write about. I may post a couple of my old pieces from the vault if I have time.

I hope that you don’t see anything new from me until January because if you do, it probably means that Trump did something outrageously stupid or dangerous. Believe it or not, I get tired of writing about him, but he dominates the political landscape… and not in a good way.

I wish you all a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy New Year, and whatever other Happy Holidays you might celebrate.

See you next year, God willing.

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