I'll start off the contra side of the debate with two simple facts from those radical leftist ideologues at the History Channel:

Congress was in session on December 25, 1789, the first Christmas under America's new constitution. Christmas wasn't declared a federal holiday until June 26, 1870.

So that takes care of the "tradition" side of the argument in some two dozen words. But I'll back up a bit and talk about the history of the War rather than the Holiday, because the former has totally eclipsed the latter.

The term "War on Christmas" was coined in 1999 by our racist friends at VDare - the people whose particular style of analysis (check this jaw-dropping article ) was enough to get them slapped with a "hate group" label by the SPLC. Since it's been picked up by FOX News as one of their leading hooks for the Holiday Christmas season, commentators like Bill O'Reilly have scrambled to find enough material to keep the 80% Christian majority in this country terrified that they're losing the battle to the 20% who couldn't care less.

There's a problem with this strategy: empty threats don't keep the public's attention for long, the history doesn't support the argument, and the actual facts on the ground are pretty slim. O'Reilly usually takes the more shameless route by inventing scandals out of thin air, whether it's companies that have banned their employees from saying "Merry Christmas" (they haven't ) or pernicious liberal teachers rewriting the lyrics to Christmas songs in order to brainwash their students (they weren't ) or school districts banning red and green clothing (they aren't ... is he even trying with this one?). Occasionally they get one right: quaoar gave an example of how an over-eager town official stopped a set of Christmas carols on behalf of a Jewish performer who couldn't care less, although even that was less an anti-Christmas gesture as an ill-advised attempt at inclusiveness.

All said, this may be the one war founded on even faultier intelligence than the one in Iraq.

I wish I could say the silly transparency of O'Reilly's claims have been enough to scuttle them outright, but the sad fact is that the memes are sticking. During Thanksgiving, my mom told me in horror about how her entire drive to New Orleans was filled with my grandparents' wailing over the way atheists were trying to destroy Christmas, and how dare those stores tell their employees they can't wish someone a Merry Christmas. (Lest you think I got even a glimmer of hope out of my conservative mom's disgust, she immediately followed that with "I agree that what those people are doing to Christmas is wrong, but I was just tired of your grandparents complaining about it so much.")

I'll give you one thing: some stores don't like wishing people a Merry Christmas. But it's not because of any liberal, leftist, atheist, George-Soros-funded conspiracy to trample tradition into the mud: it's because it makes good business sense. The term "Christmas", though hardly objectionable to anyone, still has less pulling power than the more generic term "Holidays", which caters to 100% of your potential clientele. This is Business 101, folks. It's not until the ultra-right gets its collective panties in a bunch and threatens a boycott that the "Christmas" label becomes more likely to draw profit than the "Holiday" label.

That brings up an important point: if this is a war, who exactly is doing the fighting? We have an aligned set of conservative interests: FOX news, racist websites, conservative Christians, groups that find the strangest things to protest , and my grandparents. But who's on the other side?

We've already ruled out school district superintendents and Scrooge-like bosses.

Is it the ACLU? If so, they've got a pitifully mixed record : on the one hand, they've taken the government to court over Christmas displays on public property, but on the other, they've defended cases of religious expression on the part of citizens and churches who've been denied the right to celebrate Christmas on public property. We can either group them under "confused third-party combatants", or we can acknowledge that their role in each of these cases is the same: to protect Christmas-oriented speech on the parts of inviduals and groups while preventing the establishment of Christmas as a public blanket.

Is it the liberal media? I certainly hope not. By acknowledging the meme "War on Christmas" with anything like serious debate, they've helped perpetuate it. Nothing serves to allow stupidity to float to the surface by having a faux-debate on the topic, as if it deserves two sides. Fortunately, the one time CNN tried this, their representative on the left flipped it upside down completely by turning it into a circus . Which is fine by me: why bother debating something that doesn't merit it?

But if you have to bring it up - since it does occasionally come up - you might as well have fun with it and expose it for the transparent baiting it is. And have fun with it.