MindSpinner

I am fascinated by how conservative leaders keep the religious right stirred up about some issue or another that captures the imaginations of the faithful, thereby completely distracting them from the substantive issues of the day and ensuring their undying loyalty to the Republican Party no matter what that party is actually up to. This year, it seems, the tempest in the teapot is the “War on Christmas.”

Maureen Dowd invited her conservative brother Kevin to write her column for today, and the War on Christmas is what he chose to write about. Not the war in Iraq, not spying on Americans, not the frightening expansion of the powers of the presidency, not power that seems to tell anything but forthright truth, not the plight of New Orleans, not global warming, not the workings of the mind of Samuel Alito, not the deepening plight of the poor, not the health care crisis, but the placement of nativity scenes and the wording of holiday greetings. If I had one shot to speak my mind to the readership of the NYTimes, or at least those of us who finally coughed up $50 to read Times Select content, this just would not be my topic. Even on December 24. Kevin begins,

Christmas has always been my favorite holiday. Maybe it was the extended absence from the stern Franciscan nuns at Nativity grade school. But more likely it was the decorations, the songs, the movies like “A Christmas Carol” and “Miracle on 34th Street,” that filled people with an unbridled joy and an unusual generosity of spirit. Christmas has generally been celebrated as both a secular and religious holiday in this country. Recently, the P.C. police have decided that the word Christ carries an unbearable religious aura, so they are working hard to strike the word entirely for the more generic Holiday. The battle for the soul of Christmas has heated up.

Battle for the soul of Christmas? Has not the soul of Christmas been conflicted for a long, long time - indeed since the inception of the holiday? And does “Happy Holidays” actually constitute a blow (as opposed, say, to rampant commercialism)?

The day after Christmas my children and I traverse several state lines to visit my family. Our only Democrat, besides me, was my father, and my father is dead. My mother is a Republican now disappointed in George W. Bush. (I told her she would be, but the erstwhile president of her college debate team wasn’t really hearing me at the time.) My brother is conservative, but we don’t talk politics much. My uncle is concerned for the state of my immortal soul because I’m a Democrat and therefore a babykiller. I will be interested to hear what the topics of conversation are this year, whether the issues that concern me deeply are on the map at all.

The crux of the matter is that, if we are to move this country forward, we’re going to have to find enough common ground to have sensible conversations about far-reaching issues beyond the matter of whether we say “Happy Holidays” or “Merry Christmas.” (I’m partial to “Peace on Earth,” myself.)