We're less than a week past Thanksgiving, but the fundamentalist right-wingers have already revived their annual plea for victimhood called the "war on christmas". I guess they didn't want to waste any time since the holiday shopping season is a few days shorter this year (due to a late Thanksgiving).
The hate organization disguised as a christian family organization, the American Family Association, has put out its annual list of businesses that are friendly or antagonistic toward christmas. How can they tell the difference? Well, the evil anti-christmas businesses will greet their customers with a cheery "happy holidays" (or even worse, "season's greetings"), instead of saying "merry christmas".
Of course, there is no real war on christmas. That would be ludicrous in a country as heavily christian as this one. Those businesses just know that not everyone in this country is a christian, and they are trying to show respect to ALL of their customers (a smart business practice), because christians aren't the only people who celebrate this time of the year (even though the fundamentalists would like to claim this season as theirs exclusively).
The truth is that people and cultures all over the world celebrate the winter solstice season, and many of those celebrations were happening long before christianity became a religion (or was even a gleam in the eye of their mythical god). The winter solstice is the time that has the shortest day and longest night of the year -- and is the time when the nights start to grow shorter and the days grow longer. It only makes sense it would be marked as a time for celebration (especially since, in the northern hemisphere, the crops are in and people had plenty of free time to celebrate).
The list below is of the businesses the American Family Association regards as anti-christmas. Those in yellow are just suspected of being anti-christmas, while those in red are considered to be full-blown combatants in the war on christmas. I recommend you shop at these businesses as much as possible -- because they have refused to knuckle under to the hate-mongerers, and decided to respect all of their customers.
