Not exactly.

As I understand it, the War on Christmas is part of the larger secular progressive agenda that includes the legalization of narcotics, prostitution, euthanasia, abortion, and gay marriage. According to Bill O’Reilly, who uncovered the plot, the anti-Christmas insurgency aims to replace all allusions to Christmas with non-denominational equivalents offensive to Christians and corrosive to the social fabric of America.

In short, the War on Christmas is more of a war about what to call Christmas than a war on the institution itself. Bill O’Reilly thinks Christmas™ belongs to the Christians. The Season’s Greetings folks want to bundle it together with Hanukah and Kwanzaa and reposition it as a more inclusive holiday. In that respect, it isn’t all that different from the debate about whether gays should be allowed to call their relationships Marriage™.

For reasons I don’t fully grasp, the Sanctity-of-Marriage crowd doesn’t seem as worried about non-Christian marriage as they are about non-Christian winter holidays. Why should homosexuals be allowed to celebrate Christmas but not Marriage? Why should heathens be allowed to celebrate Marriage but not Christmas? I am sure I am missing something. But, to be honest, this is not really an issue that we worry about a whole lot here at Handmeon.

Personally, I rather admire Santa, both for his generosity, and his logistical genius. Consider, for example, the brilliance and poetic justice in the policy of only bringing presents to the people who actually believe in him. I know a number of adults who buy presents for their own children and pretend that they are from Santa Claus. That certainly saves Santa a lot of trouble. And what’s more, the grownups don’t even appear to mind. They probably think everybody else is doing the same thing. Wouldn’t it be ironic if it turned out that Bill O’Reilly secretly doesn’t believe in Santa either, and he’s just been fibbing about it! He doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who believes in Santa Claus.

That being said, I think some justifiable criticism could be made of the way giving Christmas presents has come to be something of an obligation in our society. The whole tit for tat of reciprocal giving can sometimes seem more like a peculiar form of barter than a free and heartfelt expression of generosity. I guess you might say that our concept of open-ended giving as a gift ecology is implicitly critical of the exchange paradigm of the gift economy that governs Christmas and birthday giving.

At Handmeon, we encourage people to give for the joy of it, not because they ‘owe’ somebody a present. If you think about, everything we have, even our own bodies, are just on loan to us. We are going to end up letting go of everything, sooner or later. (Unless you are planning to be buried with your Rolex and your Viking cookware, like an Egyptian Pharaoh.) Maybe there isn’t anything intrinsically wrong with holding on to ‘stuff’, but there probably isn’t anything intrinsically right about it either. Nothing compels us to experience eternal flux as a catastrophe. Maybe learning to let go of things gracefully and joyfully can make us better able to appreciate life as it’s happening, just as birthdays or vacations are sometimes improved by setting aside the camera.