"Tis the Season for Cranks and Jackasses

We all know what this time of year means. The decorations, the Christmas trees, the strings of lights, the candy canes and the long lines at the checkout counters can only mean one thing. ‘Tis the season for a small, shrill, unhappy knot of malcontents to complain about all of the rest of us who enjoy and celebrate the Christmas season. You know of whom I speak. Newspaper editors are probably smart enough to reserve column space for their inevitable appearance. They’re the crybabies who affect extravagant offense whenever they see a public display acknowledging Christmas.
They can’t bear a nativity scene. Only Dracula finds crosses less bearable. Even Santa Claus ticks them off. They have a hair-trigger indignation reflex that is triggered by anything remotely or even tangentially Christian. They have the ACLU on their cell phone speed dial. And, the ACLU probably has a red hotline phone dedicated strictly to receiving phone calls from these high-strung nitwits.
And, quite naturally, the season got off to an early start this year right where one would predict, in King County, Washington. In the Seattle suburb of Medina, a parent howled in protest because somebody put up a giving tree in a local elementary school. The tree had little mitten ornaments with gift suggestions written on them. And pupils were encouraged to take the ornaments, buy and wrap the suggested present and return it to the school so the items could be given to someone in need.
And I’m quite sure that absolutely no one was surprised when one of the parents found the tree to be an offensive symbol of Christianity and demanded its removal. The school, quite predictably, caved in. And so now the little mittens are on a countertop in the school office.
"We covered the star and called it a giving tree. We hoped it would suffice, but it didn't," the school’s office manager, Chris Metzger said. "Now we just have a giving counter."
The charity survives, but the loathsome Christmas tree is gone.
The ironic thing is, that Christmas trees are not really Christian. Cutting trees and bringing them into the house is an old druid custom celebrating the winter solstice. The truly Christian part of the giving tree was the generosity to the needy. And that’s the part that survived this jerk’s attack. Neither the complainer nor the school understands that.
Of particular interest is that these attacks on Christmas so often occur in public schools, where tolerance is preached, but rarely practiced. And intolerance is always rewarded.
The giving tree was intended as a lesson for the children of a prosperous neighborhood so that they might understand that not everybody has life as easy as they do. The kids certainly learned something about their fellow man, and about what an ugly side he can have when he forgets where grace comes from. And, a few will learn how to draw attention to themselves and force their will on others.
I wonder if it’s seasonal affective disorder that makes these people act like this. I wonder if they have as much problem with this in Australia.
I remember the only time I ever visited the White Elephant store in Spokane on the day after Thanksgiving. It was about 10 years ago and standing outside the store that day was a small crowd of weirdos with picket sign asking that parents not buy their children military themed toys.
It would have just been one more encounter with another curious example of these pathological moral exhibitionists, except that there was a story about them in the Spokane Spokesman-Review the next morning. In that story, the picketers were quoted as saying that they do that every year and picketing the White Elephant is the most fun they have all year. I really had no difficulty believing that these people found that acting as sanctimonious nuisances was their idea of a good time.
I suspect that the people who emerge from their dimly lit rooms each year to crusade against everyone else’s Christmas cheer feel much the same way as those screwy picketers. They don’t care so much about whether or not a Christmas tree is an intrusive religious symbol. They actually look forward to Christmas as an opportunity to behave like jerks.
Hopefully, they will all get coal in their stockings.