Calling for a cease-fire in the war on Christmas

If there’s one thing I love about the holiday season, it’s hot chocolate. Warm, simple and delicious, hot chocolate isn’t something many people feel the need to fight about.

If everyone treated Christmas with the same kind of marshmallow-laden love they give to hot chocolate, we’d have a lot more holiday cheer to go around.

Alas, that is not the world we live in, and the snow, lights, music and other mid-December festivities have signaled the start of yet another round of Christmas time fighting.

The complaints are the same this year as they are every year.

“Christmas is an offensive term, use ‘Happy Holidays’ instead.”

“Our culture has become too commercial and forgotten the real meaning of Christmas.”

“Christmas shouldn’t be recognized as a federal holiday,” and so on.

Also unchanged is the prevalence of the talking-head Scrooges. Fox News published several Christmas-critiquing opinion columns in the last week with titles like “Prescription for Decline — Worshipping False Gods of Prosperity and Money” and “5 Ways Gift Giving Ruins the Holidays,” and they’re far from alone.  

It’s not just the news media with a steady supply of righteous holiday indignation, either.

The governor of Rhode Island made a minor splash last week when he decided to refer to the spruce in the Rhode Island statehouse as a “Christmas tree” instead of its previous designation of “holiday tree.”

A Texas school recently banned Christmas trees and the colors red and green from an upcoming “winter party.”

Even IU got sucked into the Christmas chaos earlier this month when a controversial “black Santa” display in Foster Quad earned brief national coverage and prompted an apology from the University.

I feel as if I’m living a Shakespearian comedy. Not “Winter’s Tale,” mind you — I’m talking about “Much Ado About Nothing.”  

There just doesn’t seem to be a point to all this petty squabbling.

It’s not that any of this is new — people yelling at each other over how to properly celebrate the holidays is a tradition as dutifully followed as snowmen and Christmas trees. Or holiday trees.

It isn’t even that the concept of holiday controversy is horribly bad, either — this is America, after all. We’re a nation made of millions of distinct opinions, and no solution will satisfy everyone. There’s nothing wrong with disagreeing.

It just seems unnecessary to have to deal with so much holiday hostility every year. I can’t be the only one who thinks it’d be nice to have a season without someone getting mad about hearing “Merry Christmas,” or getting mad about hearing “Happy Holidays,” or suing because his or her child’s school has a red and green poster.

In my perfect world, everyone would treat the holidays the same way they treat hot chocolate — with nothing but love and marshmallows.  

Celebrate the holiday you want the way you want to celebrate it, and leave the arguing for January.

­— kkusisto@indiana.edu