Let me assure you once more that I borrowed this idea of doing 12 Blogs of Christmas from Paul Cornell, with both his foreknowledge and blessing. I would never LaBeouf someone’s idea without permission and attribution. Having warned you two days ago that I’ve dabbled in driving a pulpit in my colorful past, I’ve been inspired by that memory to prepare a sermon for this time. It’s about holiday anger and about the dreaded 3-C’s, Crass Christmas Commercialism. Tomorrow you’ll get more fiction, and then another related fiction story the next day – assuming all of my mad schemes come together properly. And then, if the two back-to-back days of fiction come off the way I hope, there may be a gift for you in the following day, or at least a gift for the writers in our audience.

But for now, let’s settle into our pews while I give you a sermon I call…

Have yourself an angry little Christmas…

It was an anonymous letter from one of the neighbors and said this: “Not everybody in the neighborhood is Christian, and many people do not wish to see such a flagrant display of your beliefs… religious matters aside, your decorations are beyond tasteless. They are cheap, tacky, and kitschy, and a terrible eyesore.” If you want the full story in context, you can go here.

It’s not a new story. Every year someone overdoes it, by the standards of another, causing friction. Every year someone gets grumpy, to outright mad, to full blown litigious, over another person or group’s way of celebrating the holidays.

It’s not uncommon to hear, and hear it often, some variation on the phrase, “You’re trying to force your religion on me.” The idea that simple exposure equals force seems to be a new one, but it’s caught on widely.

And then, just to show how the grumpiness isn’t entirely one sided, did you hear about the Salvation Army bell ringer who got assaulted because he said, “Happy Holidays,” instead of, “Merry Christmas”? I’m sorry. I don’t have a direct link to that story. I read it somewhere a few days’ back, but forgot where. Still, it was, as I plainly recall, a reported story from an established news organization, more than just a passing anecdote.

I’d also talk about the fighting Santas in New York, but you’ve probably seen enough of that drunken nonsense for a lifetime. I know I have.

I’ve been through a lot of Christmases. Enough to see a definite trend that we seem to be getting angrier about it, year by year. I don’t think it’s down to a single cause. Most big cultural changes have many parents. In fact, one of my all time pet peeves is the phrase, “It’s not (this), it’s (this).” You can fill in those blanks with all sorts of stuff, and it’s almost always wrong. I cringed in that Next Generation episode when Data said, “Starfleet isn’t a military organization, its purpose is exploration.” And this from the one crewmember whose entire shtick is that he knows everything. He, of all people, should know better. Yes, it exists for exploration. That’s been firmly established. It’s also a military organization. That’s why you have military ranks and guns, and you push everyone around, and when the bad guys intrude, trying to blow up everything, you’re the only group that shows up to stop them. Military. Exploration. Both. Reprogram yourself, you smug, propaganda-spewing toaster!

Oops. Got off on a bit of a digression there. Getting back to our angry Christmas, I think there are many reasons it’s trending worse, rather than better.

Starting in the late 50’s, early 60’s, we began to fetishize authenticity. “Express your true feelings. Let it all out.” This was a giant mistake. Too much truth in social interaction is a killer. The rise of authenticity brought about the death of manners – or at least its severe wounding. The core essence of manners is lying. Yes, lying. Telling lies. That’s the fuel on which it runs. “Good day,” he says, even though it may not be a good day and he couldn’t give a tinker’s damn for the other fellow, truthfully not caring a whit if he has a good day. “How are you today?” she asks, politely. “Fine. And you?” he responds, even though his ex wife, who ran off with his younger brother, just served him with divorce papers that very morning.

“Excuse me?” he said, when what he authentically wanted to say was, “Speak more clearly, you mumbling, gum chomping, inarticulate moron.” Why should he ask to be excused, when the other guy was the one at fault? Because, manners. Social lying to lubricate the daily machinery of human interaction, so the Brobdingnagian machine doesn’t grind itself apart. I think we’re losing our manners, as a whole (thank you, every individual hold-out to this trend) and the machinery’s breaking down. The result is more anger towards each other on Christmas, and at any other perceived provocation.

Another father of this problem is that anyone who uses the word “force” when what he means is “exposure” hasn’t been immediately shouted down as an idiot, because sometimes the need for truth does outweigh a desire for manners, and this is one of those instances. A different version of this phenomenon is that we often accept the notion of “Freedom from” as if that were the same thing as actual freedom. It’s not. “Freedom from hunger,” popularized by none other than the late great Norman Rockwell, in his Four Freedoms paintings, has nothing to do with freedom. It’s another way of saying it’s someone else’s job to feed me. “Freedom from fear,” means protect me. Protecting someone from what makes him fearful may be a fine thing worth doing, but it isn’t freedom. And “freedom from exposure to (fill in the blank)” has taken over the asylum. We’ve come to accept that rhetorical imposter as a reality.

It’s axiomatic that we get more of the behavior we reward and less of the behavior we punish. And now we tend to reward almost anyone who gets indignant about almost anything. I could spend the rest of my writing career citing examples.

So, the complainers get to make the rules now, manners are in short supply, and anyone who’s exposed to anything he doesn’t like, all too often gets away with claiming compulsion. It’s simply not true that every human interaction has an oppressor and a victim.

Conceding many other contributing factors, I believe these things are at the heart of the problem. If you want a better, less angry Christmas, I have a possible solution for those willing to try it. A few rules I’ve gleaned from many helpful sources. Here they are:

Don’t let yourself get angry at things not actually imposing on you. Anger, like most states of mind, is under your control. If you disagree, and think your emotions aren’t under your control, try this experiment. Go get angry at a Cop and see what happens. I’ll bet you can be all kinds of grumpy in every other part of your life and still control yourself to talk nicely to a cop, or the boss who can fire you, or any number of others who’ve the power to adversely influence your life. Most of you really angry cusses are actually pretty damn careful about who you unload on. That’s why people celebrating Christmas get scolded so much. They tend not to come barreling at you with dire consequences, when you yell at them. So stop it. Stop getting angry, even though you can so often get away with it.
When someone wishes you a Merry Christmas and you aren’t Christian, so what? You were not harmed in any way. The polite response is to say, “Thank you,” and move on. If you’re devoted to another religion, it’s also fine to say, for example, “Thank you, and Happy Hanukah to you.”
When someone wishes you a Happy Holidays and you are Christian, and maybe even a little upset over the devaluing of Christ in Christmas, so what? You were not harmed in any way. The polite response is to say, “Thank you,” and move on. If it’s important to express your preferences, it’s also fine to say, “Thank you, and Merry Christmas.” You can even get folksy and dress it up a bit with, “I’ll see your Happy Holidays and send a Merry Christmas right back at’cha.” It is not acceptable to attack. Relearn your manners.
Even if you don’t appreciate it, say “Thank you” anyway. Tell the good lie. Authenticity is for the dung heap.

Maybe the entire point of this sermon boils down to this: Try to be nicer.

Also, let’s add some behaviorism. If you act cheerful, you’ll start being cheerful. It works. Your moods and your passions really are largely under your control, and if not, they can be trained. For a lovely illustration of this, treat yourself to the splendid movie, The Madness of King George. It’s about King George – the one that lost the American colonies, who did go a bit round the bend, until he was finally cured (or at least treated successfully) by a doctor whose crazy new idea was, the secret to being sane is in being forced to act as if you were sane. Pretty soon the training takes and one gets better.

Related to this, sort of, is what I’d promised above: My take on the 3-C’s, Crass Commercial Consumerism. Lot’s of folks complain about it. My question in response to said complaint can probably be intuited by now, based on all that stuff written above: So what? How does it hurt you?

The fact that at this time of year scads of people drive themselves to distraction, devoting too much worry, time and money in their attempts to buy just the right thing for other people doesn’t seem too bad a thing to me. In fact, I’m all for it.

Please treat your retailer nicer though. She’s having a tough time of it. Retailing at any time is a tough stressful job, and during the Christmas rush that stress and frustration is dialed up to eleven. Also, there’s a good chance she was hired just a short time ago, to help man the Christmas rush, and hasn’t had the more intensive training the permanent hires get. So do please remember your manners and cut her some slack.

That, more or less, is what I think about that. And even though I shamelessly sermonized, I didn’t force anything on you. In fact, I haven’t even made demands. I’ve made a few requests though. I did do that. How about it, you Grinches, Grumpkins and Humbugs? Think about giving it a try over the following days.

And Merry Christmas.