Winning the War on the War on Xmas

First of all, before getting your shorts in a bunch about "Xmas," ask a Christian friend who understands Greek. It's really okay. There's nothing disrespectful about it.

Relax.

I never got too worked up about the War on Xmas, but this year it's starting to alarm me. All these Black Friday ads are creeping me out. "Black Friday" sounds like a title for a Stephen King novel.

It turns out it's worse than that. It's a name for any day of the week that a corporation can make a shit-load of money by enticing millions of people -- some of them allegedly Christians who noisily complain about the War on Xmas -- to trample each other in order to get discounts on electronic devices that help their kids remember the little baby Jesus and his later injunction to give all you have to the poor and follow him.

How still we see Thee lie.

Or . . . they fight and trample for these gifts because they seek shelter from the seriousness of life and the possibility that it has a spiritual component.

Previously, I thought the War on Xmas was about store clerks not saying "Merry Christmas" to everyone because they were so dumb they didn't realize that everyone celebrates the birth of Jesus, or about Starbucks forgetting to put Jesusy stuff on red cups, but now I see I was wrong and it's worse than that.

Think of the damage the War on Xmas does: Many, many middle-class-and-below Christians with strong family values are forced to give up their Thanksgiving and whatever day or days their company chooses to hold Black Friday.

Then, on Xmas morning, think of the millions of little children, who, after tearing the wrapper off countless presents under the gloriously glowing Xmas tree, will be crushed, will pout and throw tantrums, once they learn that not one of their gifts pertained in any way to the stories they'd been told about the little baby Jesus.

Okay, let's get to a solution quickly before it's too late for this season.

The goal here is to celebrate Xmas entirely in the spirit of the birth of the little baby Jesus, with perhaps just a few foretastes of his grownup values.

The focus, then, would need to be almost entirely on the birth of a baby of an impoverished family in desperate circumstances fleeing their rightful home and now entirely at the mercy of foreigners. Sadly, I can't think of any analogous situation from our own time, but feel free to ponder it.

All services or masses done to celebrate this moment must be baby-in-crisis related. We can allow Xmas church services, but the minister-preacher-priest-pastor at these events must be female, and must be holding an infant, preferably one she has given birth to, and she must speak briefly only about that miracle and no other subject. That's stunning enough for most of us. 

Oh, and she should feel free to speculate that her little baby, if brought up in a healthy, caring, nurturing environment, may grow up to be a kind of savior in his or her own right.

She absolutely can NOT speak long enough to make infants, toddlers or old people restless or sleepy. That goes against the spirit, and indicates something about the occasion has gone badly wrong.

All Xmas presents will in some way call attention to or provide assistance to babies who have the bad luck to be turned away from inns and to be born in unsavory environments and suffered any form of neglect or abuse. Children will soon grow to look forward all year to that special day when they make life on the planet a little less horrible for another human being. I mean, what else are they here for?

No Christian will be allowed to profit from the new Xmas.

Those who are caught breaking this commandment will get a very special punishment, and it will take a little work to set up the means for it. It may be too late for this Xmas, but we could certainly have it in place for 2022:

All abandoned golf courses (that for decades have helped find a home for all our excess water) and strip malls will be transformed into thousands of mini-farms large enough to hold some livestock -- a couple of donkeys, some cattle, a few pigs, two sheep, a goat and five geese -- a stable, a high-end luxury hotel and a hospital. 

Both the hotel and the hospital will be filled to capacity, the emergency room of the latter being a veritable refugee center for every bleeding, heroin-over-dosed, oxycontin-popping, projectile-vomiting, emaciated, unwashed, uninsured and unloved human in America -- all of them crammed in there like so many prisoners in a boxcar.

O ye beneath life's crushing load, Whose forms are bending low . . .

Every Christian CEO of every Target, Best Buy, Wal-Mart, and all the other Black Friday keepers who prosper from Xmas, as well as all the friends and family of these CEOs, will be required to have their next baby in one of those stables. 

Yes, even male CEOs, especially male CEOs, must give birth in one of those stables, after, of course, being turned away from the luxury hotel and the hospital, even if they only want to use their plumbing.

And don't be balking at the idea of men having babies. If an uneducated young virgin woman can make it work, a man can, too.

What child is this?