{"id":169,"date":"2005-12-02T12:17:00","date_gmt":"2005-12-02T18:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/?p=169"},"modified":"2005-12-02T12:25:40","modified_gmt":"2005-12-02T18:25:40","slug":"169","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/loco\/169\/","title":{"rendered":"Merry (insert greeting here)"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a column that didn’t make it to A1 — selling cop porn \/ copyright violations being today’s A1 <\/p>\n

Amusement — Jim Belshaw provides the QOTD<\/abbr> (though not yet in the HTML edition):<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Xmas War?It\u2019s all part of the Merry Christmas-Happy Holidays <\/p>\n

mythical<\/em> war. … Are you tired of all this yet? You should be. I know I am. There is no war on Christmas.<\/strong> <\/p>\n

There are incidents from each side of the trenches with nuggets of truth and bad judgments and bad decisions. But there is no war against <\/p>\n

Christmas. There are only people in need of creating one where none exists.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Take if from <\/p>\n

this atheist\/antaganostic\/anti-theist (if there were a god, I’d hate him): Merry Christmas! It means no more or less to me than Happy <\/p>\n

Holidays or Season’s Greetings! And those well-wishes do mean something to me: Xmas is the time of year in the US when more people are <\/p>\n

spontaneously happy. Who would make war on that?<\/p>\n

No one, obviously. And just as obviously, FUD<\/acronym> and anger are tools for controlling your base. Tell your folks everyone is out to get them and they’ll stay closer <\/p>\n

to the fold.<\/p>\n

The only time I’ve gotten a negative response to saying “Merry Christmas” was from a church-goer who told me “we <\/p>\n

don’t celebrate Christmas.” Hell, even my Jewish friends celebrate the season. I don’t celebrate Christ, just Christmas, that mongrel <\/p>\n

holiday of happiness and optimism in the midst of dark and cold.<\/p>\n

Happy Saturnalia, everyone! Happy Long Night! And a joyous New <\/p>\n

Calendar to you and yours! mjh<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a column that didn’t make it to A1 — selling cop porn \/ copyright violations being today’s A1 Amusement — Jim Belshaw provides the QOTD (though not yet in the HTML edition): It\u2019s all part of the Merry Christmas-Happy Holidays mythical war. … Are you tired of all this yet? You should be. I … Continue reading Merry (insert greeting here)<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-loco"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}