All right, I’ve finally put my finger on the two or three things that bug the living shit out of me about all this Christmas nonsense.
Julie West is tired of being wished “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” She’s annoyed with department stores that use “Season’s Greetings” banners, and with public schools that teach about Hanukkah and Kwanzaa but won’t touch the Nativity story.
So last week, she sent a baked protest to a holiday party at her first-grade son’s school: a chocolate cake with vanilla frosting and red icing that spelled out “Happy Birthday Jesus.”
[snip]
Although her son’s teacher expressed some misgivings, West served slices of her “Happy Birthday Jesus” cake to 20 first-graders and about five other parents. No one complained, she says.
“I had gotten a legal opinion from the Rutherford Institute saying I was within my rights before I brought the cake to school,” West says. “That’s Christmas this year, I guess: candy cane frosting and a legal opinion.”
Wow. Way to witness. I’m sure many, many 6-year-old children were won over by your example of bravery and compassion in … baking a cake. Way to just blow everybody away with a sign of what it really means to be a Christian. Serving food to the homeless, baking a cake for the poor, no, that wouldn’t have been showy enough for you. Nothing would suffice but a cake wishing Jesus a Bon Natale, fed to middle-class brats in a suburban classroom.
Just a reminder. Cubic tonnage of shit we can’t get anybody to bake a cake for, but about which Jesus seemed a little bit preoccupied includes both poverty and violence.
Talk about those things in a religious context and you’re the crazy person at the party. But put a party hat on the Big JC and suddenly you’re right in vogue. This kind of showing off is just cheap postulating to look good to the other PTA moms. It has nothing to do with Christianity, and it’s time we started saying so.
And guess what, Little Becky Constant Sorrow? Nobody forced you to get a legal opinion. Note to wingnuts everywhere: the existence of shit you might not like somewhere in the world does not require you to get offended to the tenth degree of psycho. You know what I used to do about shit I didn’t like, like people who equate baked goods with religious expression? I ignored them. Land of the free and all that.
Don’t like the clerks wishing you a Happy Holidays, which by the way has been going on since I was five and my dad instructed his pharmacy clerks over the intercom to “Have a Merry Fucking Christmas and a Happy Fucking Holiday?” Don’t shop at the store anymore. Or suck it up, and realize that, as Hecate over at the crack den said, the clerk doesn’t really want you to have a merry anything anyway. The clerk just wants you to get the fuck out of the store so she can close up and go home to her kids.
Tired of the secularlization of Christmas? Get your fat ass to church, and quit complaining about how nobody’s as virtuous as you used to be before people starting putting up those “Season’s Greetings” signs. Schmucks.
A.