In the right-wing imaginary, the War on Christmas had a good run. Fox News host John Gibson alleged in a 2005 book that liberals were planning to “ban the sacred holiday,” and a moral panic was born, yielding outrage after outrage almost every year. This year, however, the defenders of all things merry and bright have been pretty quiet, and polling shows that even among conservatives and Donald Trump supporters, a declining minority of Americans believe that the beloved holiday is under siege. Sensitive neighbors (and corporations hoping to avoid their ire) may continue to wish us a “Happy Holidays,” the ACLU may continue to object to religious iconography in the town square, yet Americans are ignoring the likes of Tucker Carlson and Bill O’Reilly, instead adulting with a “live and let live” attitude.
This rare moment of cultural chill allows us to come together as Americans to confront the real war on Christmas, the one you won’t hear about on Fox News: a class war.
If you’ve read Charles Dickens’s 1843 classic A Christmas Carol, you’ll remember that the main character is one of literature’s nastiest bosses. Ebenezer Scrooge hates the holiday and resents giving his employee, Bob Cratchit, even one paid day off with his family, calling Christmas “a poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket” and demanding that the terrified Cratchit be at his desk “all the earlier” the next day.
As bad as that sounds, poor Bob Cratchit had it easier than many American workers today. A recent survey of over one thousand workers found that one in ten were working on Christmas Day. Nearly one in four expected to be working on Christmas Eve, while more expected to work on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day. Reasons included needing the money and lacking paid time off.
Dickens, like his contemporary,…
Auteur: Liza Featherstone
