Manufactured outrage -- the "War on Christmas: A view from an unlikely source

UPDATE: 12/4/2005:

I Went back to Wal-Mart, and the Spanish Equivalent of "Home for the Holidays" is "Navidad en Familia,"

Now, I'm not a Spanish scholar, but even to my untrained eye, not only does it explicity use the term "Christmas," it has a different meaning than the English version.

This is, indeed, an interesting phenomen, and it might be worth investigatine why Wal-Marts marketing department believes that Anglos and Latinos need different messages. Of course, one of the problems with this in South Texas is that the Latinos are really Tejanos who have been living in Texas for generations and are totally bilingual. In fact, I heard lots of people switch back and forth between English and Spanish, apparently at random. This is even more impressive than Yeshivish, which is basically English larded (you should pardon the dxpressionj) with Yiddish and Hebrew phrases.

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Dov Bear has been haken a tsheinik over the right-wing's manufactured outrage at the so-called "War on Christmas." And he is correct to mock the nonsense being spouted in an rather pathetic attempt by the right-wing commentators to divert attention from their spectacular failures in their understanding of the reality-based world. Though I do have to say that I enjoy the winter solistice holiday season -- It's the only real holiday season for Jews, because on Jewish holidays, there's just so much work that needs to be done to observe them properly. With Christmas on the other hand, I get a well-deserved rest, even if I have to go into work on that day. And for a whole months, things just sort of slow down.

But I post now to provide some more insight on this phenomenon from a part of our great land usually ignored by the bi-coastal elites. My job recently took me to South Texas, where I received an introducion to a multicultural America that I had head about, but never experienced. The money shot occured when I needed some 1-hour photo processing, and I entered my very first bilingual Wal-Mart. The signs were in both English and Spanish, and the English signs used Wal-Mart's "multicultural" marketing slgan "Home for the Holidays."

"Aha!" the right-wingers would say, "Another example of how the evil liberal Jews are trying to destroy our Christian culture!" But then you notice the Spanish version. Unfortunately, I don't speak Spanish, but I did notice the word "Navidad." Even I now that means "Christmas."

So I learned 2 things in South Texas:

1) People marketing to Tejanos (Texans of Mexican descent) have no problem with Christmas, and
2) The Jews have nothing to do with to do with the way Christmas is marketed.

In the counties I visited, you could probably count the available Jews with the fingers of one hand. In fact, I went out to the paking lot of that particula Wal-Mart to call home, and I believe that, for the first time in the history of the world, the words "leyn Torah" were uttered at that particular location.

It's so obvious. The people in this goyische locale, the vast majority of whom are fervent frum Christians are by no means deprived of their religious heritage. They are equally at ease with multicultural sensitivity as well as celebraing their yuntiff in public with no self-concioussness or embarassment. And they are very tolerant of other faiths, as they made no attempt to beat up a Jewboy who uttered Yiddish words in a Wal-Mart parking lot.

Clearly, the right wingnuts who are spouting this nonsense have no conception of the Real America.

I do have to say, though, the best thing about Texas is the way they cook brisket.


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