Frankly, I find this take baffling. But it’s clearly a good-faith (seriously, no pun intended) take, so I hope this will be a welcome response. I’m also an ath

Frankly, I find this take baffling. But it’s clearly a good-faith (seriously, no pun intended) take, so I hope this will be a welcome response. I’m also an atheist. But I was raised Christian, attended Christian private school for a few years, and have taken personal interest in understanding the faith and its underpinnings well past the time I lost my own faith. It’s true that most of the religious aspects of Christmas have been diluted if not basically vanished from the holiday. But it’s far from a new truth. For most worshippers, the commercialization and secularization has been part of the holiday for at least half a century. It was Christians who either led this development or eagerly adopted it. Among Christians who would object to that, more do not celebrate the holiday as a matter of their faith than seek to de-secularize it. This has never been part of the “War on Christmas” narrative. That narrative has, alongside many other narratives like it, been an imagined victimization story that Christmas—in all its secularized form—is being “canceled” by things like saying “happy holidays” or merely including other religious holidays in greetings around the same time of year. At first this was all very explicit, and probably for many a sincere reaction to feeling less centered in the universe. By the time “War on Christmas” became a phrase in any kind of common usage it had become a manipulative dog whistle to tell the people receptive to said manipulation that there’s another “attack” on them. It’s the same trajectory similar reactions to majority feelings of being less centered have been exploited for invented culture war bullshit. This is just the inverse of how pre-secularized Christmas came to be. Christmas was never a Christian tradition, it’s always been a winter solstice celebration which was used as a (mostly subtler) cudgel to convert Pagans. If there ever was an attack on ritual celebration of Christ’s birth, it would have been that. Moreover, Christmas isn’t and never has been the “high holy holiday” for devout Christians. That holiday is Easter, which celebrates the transition of Jesus as prophet to Christ, son of God, who died and was reborn to eternally absolve humanity of their sins. That holiday has likewise been commercialized and secularized and infused with Paganism. But there’s no corresponding Easter War! Seems weird but… most Christians don’t (pardon) give a god damn. It was never about the holiday. It was always about moral panic as a manipulation technique.