It's the most wonderful war of the year

Welp, I guess it's time to dust off my camo and flak jacket and helmet and guns.

The War on Christmas is starting early this year.

I wish I was kidding about this, but I'm not.  It's not even Halloween and already the right-wing religious nutcakes are bringing back the claims that we non-religious types, and the Democrats in general, are planning to carpet-bomb Whoville or something.  This time it's started with the House Republican Caucus, which tweeted a photo of President Biden a couple of days ago along with the message, "This is the guys [sic] who is trying to steal Christmas.  Americans are NOT going to let that happen."

This year the gist of it seems to revolve around the (genuine) supply-chain problems that have been plaguing the United States for months, and which will probably result in raised prices and some items being delayed in shipping, if not outright unavailable.  I can understand the frustration with this.  On the other hand, complex problems rarely have one cause, and saying "This is Joe Biden's fault!" is just plain idiotic.  How much of it has to do with the current administration's policies, how much of it with leftovers from the previous administration's policies, and how much of it is pure circumstance (e.g. the pandemic) is not a simple question.

Much easier just do say "Biden did it!" and whip up some nice, Christmas-y outrage, despite the fact that Biden himself is a staunch Catholic and would hardly be likely to have secret aspirations to take over the Grinch's job now that the latter's heart grew three sizes.

Of course, "in touch with reality" is not a phrase that is generally associated with these people.  The whole War-on-Christmas trope goes back to 2005, when right-wing radio host John Gibson published a book called, The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought.  This was sixteen years ago, and every single year since then Fox News has spent inordinate amounts of time screeching about how we secular-minded types are secretly trying to ban Christian holidays, prevent anyone from saying "merry Christmas," and jail people who attend holiday services.

Now, I don't know if you've noticed, but if you'll think back carefully, you may recall that in every single one of those sixteen years, Christmas has happened, right on schedule.  People still say "merry Christmas" all they want with no repercussions, and no one has been arrested coming out of church on Christmas morning.

For a "liberal plot that's worse than you thought," odd that it's had zero discernible effect.

This would be honestly be hilarious if these people didn't have so much power over the American psyche.  The mystifying part, though, is that all you have to do is look around to realize that they're either delusional or lying outright.  Merely driving through any random town in America in December should be sufficient to convince you that Christmas is alive and well.  Around here, we have lots of folks who put up holiday displays in their yards with giant inflatable Santas, reindeer with glowing noses, various takes on nativity scenes, and enough lights to disrupt air traffic.  All the local stores start putting out Christmas-related stuff in November or earlier, so the capitalist side of the celebration is still as lucrative as ever.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons © Achim Raschka / CC BY-SA 4.0 (via Wikimedia Commons), 13-12-16 Christmas house decoration, CC BY-SA 3.0]

What is ironic about all this is that I, and a great many non-religious folks I know, all celebrate Christmas.  If I really harbored deep-seated anti-Christian rancor you'd think that avoiding Christmas entirely would be an easy choice for me; not only am I not religious, my wife is Jewish.  Built-in excuse, right there.  Despite that, we put up a Christmas tree most years, always exchange gifts, and send out holiday cards when we can get our act together sufficiently to write them before Christmas Eve.  I do this mainly because (1) I think Christmas trees are pretty, and (2) I love giving people stuff.  I may not believe all the religious side of the holiday, but it's pretty obvious I'm not hostile to it.

The bottom line is -- and I've said this enough times that you'd think the point would be made -- 99% of secular folks, myself included, do not give a flying rat's ass what exactly you choose to believe, nor how you express those beliefs.  You can believe that your life's path is being directed by the divine influence of a magical bunny from the Andromeda Galaxy if you want to.  You can wear a bunny suit everywhere you go, wiggle your nose when you're annoyed, and eat nothing but carrots.  I honestly do not give a damn.

What I object to is when you start saying that the rest of us have to believe in the magical bunny, and want to open all public meetings with bunny-prayers, and demand that public school science classes include a unit on the Theory of Young-Earth Bunnyism.  Then you're gonna have a fight on your hands.

But this isn't being driven by logic and evidence, and never has been.  The people who make a huge deal out of the War on Christmas every year seem to fall into two categories: (1) partisan yahoos who want to stir up outrage against the other side and don't mind lying through their teeth to do it, and (2) truly religious types who also have a wide streak of paranoia and the gullibility to believe what they hear on Fox News.  The rest of us, religious and non-religious alike, usually all get along pretty well.

But I guess that's all beside the point.  Tiresome though it is, if you're an atheist, duty is duty.  Uncle Sam Wants YOU.  (Not that Uncle Sam, I'm talking about Sam Harris.)  I guess when you're called up, you don't really have a choice in the matter.  So, into the breach, may Dawkins protect us, and all that sort of thing.  I'm not optimistic about winning this year, given that we're 0-and-16, but you never know.  If we're lucky, maybe we'll get some supernatural assistance from the ghost of Christopher Hitchens.

Failing that, it'll be up to the magical bunny from Andromeda, and his track record ain't that great, either.

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My dad once quipped about me that my two favorite kinds of food were "plenty" and "often."  He wasn't far wrong.  I not only have eclectic tastes, I love trying new things -- and surprising, considering my penchant for culinary adventure, have only rarely run across anything I truly did not like.

So the new book Gastro Obscura: A Food Adventurer's Guide by Cecily Wong and Dylan Thuras is right down my alley.  Wong and Thuras traveled to all seven continents to find the most interesting and unique foods each had to offer -- their discoveries included a Chilean beer that includes fog as an ingredient, a fish paste from Italy that is still being made the same way it was by the Romans two millennia ago, a Sardinian pasta so loved by the locals it's called "the threads of God," and a tea that is so rare it is only served in one tea house on the slopes of Mount Hua in China.

If you're a foodie -- or if, like me, you're not sophisticated enough for that appellation but just like to eat -- you should check out Gastro Obscura.  You'll gain a new appreciation for the diversity of cuisines the world has to offer, and might end up thinking differently about what you serve on your own table.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Getting into the spirit

So it's Black Friday, wherein we Americans follow up a day set aside to give thanks for everything we have with a day set aside to trample each other to death trying to save money on overhyped garbage we really don't need.

Me, I stay right the hell away from stores on Black Friday.  I hate shopping in any case, and the rabid crowds only make it worse.  Plus, today marks the first day of the Little Drummer Boy Challenge, a yearly contest in which participants see how long they can make it into the Christmas season without hearing "The Little Drummer Boy," which ranks right up there with "Frosty the Snowman" and "Santa Claus is Comin' to Town" as the most annoying Christmas carol ever written.  I've participated in this contest for six years, and haven't made it to Christmas Day undefeated yet.  Last year, I was taken out of the competition by a clerk in a hardware store who didn't even know all of the freakin' words, and kept having to la-la bits of it:

Come they LA LA pah-rum-puh-pum-pum
A newborn LA LA LA pah-rum-puh-pum-pum
Our LA LA gifts we bring pah-rum-puh-pum-pum
LA LA before the king pah-rum-puh-pum-pum, rum-puh-pum-pum, rum-puh-pum-pum

And so on and so forth.  He was singing it with hearty good cheer, so I felt kind of guilty when I realized that he'd knocked me out of the game and blurted out, "Are you fucking kidding me?" a little louder than I intended, eliciting a shocked look from the clerk and a significant diminishment in the general Christmas cheer amongst those around me.

Thomas Couture, The Drummer Boy (1857) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Of course, the Christmas season wouldn't be complete without the Fox News types ramping up the whole imaginary War on Christmas thing.  We atheists have allegedly been waging this war for what, now... ten years?  Eleven?  And yet if you'll look around you, just like the Grinch's attempt at banishing Christmas from Whoville, the holiday season still goes right on, pretty much exactly as it did before.

Oops!  Shouldn't say "holiday," because that's part of the War on Christmas, too, even though the word "holiday" comes from "holy day" and therefore is also religious.  This is a point that seems to escape a lot of the Fox News and OAN commentators and their ilk, but to be fair "grip on reality" has never been their forte anyhow.  And since the War on Christmas is getting to be old hat, this year they decided that we Godless Liberal Democratic Unpatriotic Snowflakes are just not coming across as evil enough, so we must also be conducting a War on Thanksgiving.

Take, for example, Matt Walsh, of Daily Wire, who said last week, "We’ve been worried about the War on Christmas but the Dems just snuck in the side entrance and canceled Thanksgiving instead," presumably because of our unreasonable and anti-American desire to keep everyone who's here at Thanksgiving still alive by Christmas.  Not to be outdone, a headline in Breitbart warned, "Be Prepared for Democrats to Cancel Christmas," prompting a church in Colorado to publish a bulletin titled, "Ten Top Reasons Why Liberals Hate the Holidays." 

What is wryly amusing about all of this is that I'm one of the aforementioned liberal atheists, and I love the holidays.  We had a nice turkey-and-stuffing dinner yesterday for Thanksgiving, and I'm already putting together some gifts for friends and family for Christmas and looking forward to putting up a tree.  So it might come as a surprise to Matt Walsh et al. that in December I tell people "Merry Christmas" at least as often as I say "Happy Holidays."  Basically, if someone says "Merry Christmas" to me, I say it back to them; if they say, "Happy Holidays," I say that.  Likewise "Happy Hanukkah," "Blessed Solstice," "Merry Festivus," or "Have A Nice Day."

You know why?  If people speak kindly to me, I reciprocate, because I may be a liberal and an atheist, but I am not an asshole.  So I guess that's three ways in which I differ from Matt Walsh.

Basically, be nice to me, I'll be nice to you.  Unless you're singing "The Little Drummer Boy."  I'm sorry, but my tolerance does have its limits.

In any case, mostly what I plan to do today is to sit around home, recovering from the food-and-wine-induced coma in which I spent most of yesterday evening.  So however you choose to observe the day and the season, I hope you enjoy it, whether you get into the spirit of it or pretty much ignore the whole thing.

Pah-rum-puh-pum-pum.

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I'm fascinated with history, and being that I also write speculative fiction, a lot of times I ponder the question of how things would be different if you changed one historical event.  The topic has been visited over and over by authors for a very long time; three early examples are Ray Bradbury's "The Sound of Thunder" (1952), Keith Roberts's Pavane (1968), and R. A. Lafferty's screamingly funny "Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne" (1967).

There are a few pivotal moments that truly merit the overused nametag of "turning points in history," where a change almost certainly would have resulted in a very, very different future.  One of these is the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, which happened in 9 C.E., when a group of Germanic guerrilla fighters maneuvered the highly-trained, much better-armed Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Roman Legions into a trap and slaughtered them, almost to the last man.  There were twenty thousand casualties on the Roman side -- amounting to half their total military forces at the time -- and only about five hundred on the Germans'.

The loss stopped Rome in its tracks, and they never again made any serious attempts to conquer lands east of the Rhine.  There's some evidence that the defeat was so profoundly demoralizing to the Emperor Augustus that it contributed to his mental decline and death five years later.  This battle -- the site of which was recently discovered and excavated by archaeologists -- is the subject of the fantastic book The Battle That Stopped Rome by Peter Wells, which looks at the evidence collected at the location, near the village of Kalkriese, as well as the historical documents describing the massacre.  This is not just a book for history buffs, though; it gives a vivid look at what life was like at the time, and paints a fascinating if grisly picture of one of the most striking David-vs.-Goliath battles ever fought.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]