One of the fun parts of being a total atheist is that you don't give a damn what religion someone believes. Seriously, someone can tell me they think that God is a toilet and shitting is the way to give thanks to Him for His blessings of indoor plumbing. It doesn't fucking matter. In fact, unless you are making laws according to your religion and imposing them on me or you're harming others based on your faith, why should I care? You're just a harmless person who believes that fairy tales are real and, c'mon, who gives a fuck? You think Cinderella really went to a ball so you wear glass slippers around your neck? Groovy, man. Enjoy.
So when President Donald Trump made a big fuckin' deal about being "allowed" to say, "Merry Christmas" again, I wondered who the fuck was stopping him. I mean, you wanna say, "Merry Christmas" or "Hail Satan" or "I fuck unicorns," I'm not gonna care (ok, I'll be a little judgmental about the unicorn fucking - or at least curious as to what that fucking is like). Who said you couldn't say, "Merry Christmas"? Everyone I've known ever has always said, "Merry Christmas." I say, "Merry Christmas" and I think that Jesus is a fictional character in an overlong, poorly-plotted book.
The whole "War on Christmas" started because back in the late 1990s/early 2000s desperate attention whores like Bill O'Reilly heard about some stores that said their employees needed to say, "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" because, you know, they're stores and don't wanna piss off prickly Jews, Muslims, atheists, and whoever else. It was stupid, sure, but so is worshipping an invisible sky wizard (and so is going to war because you think your invisible sky wizard is better than someone else's invisible sky wizard and fuck them for daring to say that the place where their totally fictional did some totally fictional magical thing should belong to them. Or whatever. It's all just nonsense).
The point here is that while Trump was tweeting insane shit about how he "led the charge against the assault of our cherished and beautiful phrase" and while a Trump PAC was putting out a propaganda video with a little girl "fanking" the "pwesident" for "wetting" her say, "Mewwy Chwistmas" again, a video that'd make Joseph Goebbels roll his eyes from how obvious it is, the rest of us were thinking, "The fuck? When couldn't we say, 'Merry Christmas'?" Because, see, we always could. Sometimes we choose not to because we want to be polite to people who don't celebrate it. Sometimes we say, "Happy Holidays" when we're talking about Christmas and New Year's and Hanukkah and Kwanzaa whatever else the fuck is celebrated that we gotta list because it's shorter.
This is one of the joys of true atheism. "Man, those Jehovah's Witnesses, they're crazy," I've been told by people who think that eating the flesh of their Lord and Savior is a benign ritual. When I was asked to be a godfather at a baptism, I agreed, and, at the ceremony, when I was asked, "Do you deny Satan and all his works?" I answered, "Yeah, sure" because it meant the same thing to me as if you had asked me if I really hate Voldemort and want to destroy his Horcruxes.
It also works fine when someone gets upset about Kwanzaa, calling it a "made-up holiday." Motherfucker, they're all made-up holidays. Every single religious holiday is just made up based on someone's fictional book of faith. The only holidays that aren't are the ones that celebrate real, living, breathing people, like Presidents' Day or Martin Luther King Day. Still, I've always liked Christmas because a lot of people genuinely try to be nicer. And there's eggnog. And gifts. What's not to like? Hell, the decorations, even the religious ones, can be awfully lovely. So hope you had a merry one. Or happy, if you're British.
As desperately as conservatives want this "Merry Christmas" thing to be, well, a thing, it's not. Every Jew and Muslim and Hindu I've ever met has no fuckin' problem with "Merry Christmas." A few dicks might, but a few dicks will always be dickish. And some of those dicks exploit minor dickishness in order to show that they are major dicks.
Trump taking credit for "bringing Christmas back...bigger and better" is like standing in a rainstorm in a boat in the middle of a reservoir that was always full and declaring you have ended a drought. As much of a liar as you are, there will always be people who believe there was a drought and that you made it rain. But then again, that's how we got religions.
Real, confident atheists don't think it's offensive to say, "Merry Christmas." We think it's adorable.
