I don't particularly want to bother substantiating this point, so, at the behest of a friend, I will just assert it. Besides, I trust it will not prove controversial to anyone:
Everyone who is worried about a "war on Christmas" has it perfectly backward, because Christmas wasn't that big of a deal, or such a central part of our domestic and cultural life, until it became essentially secularized and entered the mainstream of American culture as a part of our "civil religion," rather than as a part of Christianity.
We all started caring about Christmas in exact proportion to the extent to which it stopped being about Jesus. "Christmas" in this country is really not about Jesus, and never has been. It's about the United States, and Charles Dickens, and a handful of modern liberal values that provide a surface-coating of moral coherence to this ever-fracturing society.
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