Does anyone else remember several years back when every Father’s Day was celebrated by various columnists feeling the overwhelming need to point out that there are a lot of dads that ditched their wife, beat their wife and kids, and/or were just generally worthless people? I don’t miss that ritual at all.

It takes a special kind of loser who spends the holiday season on a soapbox for the sole sake of denigrating someone else’s holiday.

The last couple years the target has been Kwanzaa. If you don’t like Kwanzaa, by all means don’t celebrate it. It’s a really simple concept. I personally can’t take it seriously, so I don’t celebrate it. But there are always some people out there that feel that it’s their job to Set The Record Straight and generally be a know-it-all prick.

Are critics of Kwanzaa factually correct? I’ve seen nothing to suggest that they aren’t. Then again, junior high school kids are factually correct when they call the fat kid a “fat-ass”. It doesn’t make them any less a jerk. People who go out of their way to denigrate Kwanzaa don’t do it out of some cosmic devotion to factual accuracy. They do it because it makes them feel superior (Ooooh! Look at me! I’m politically incorrect! I’m a rrrrrebel!!!!!) at best. At worst, it’s a wonderful opportunity to lord it over black people while being able to say that you’re not attacking black people.

The same is true for all of those people that believe that Christmas is the perfect opportunity to point out that it was absconded from the pagans, the Christ was almost certainly not born in December, and so on. Yay for you. You sure are smarter than all those Christian rubes! Haha! You’re right and they’re wrong! You’re wise and they’re dumb. Go you!

Somewhat unrelatedly, it seems that last year the story of the year was the supposed War on Christmas cause stores had the gall to tell their employees for people to wish people a Happy Holiday or whatnot rather than Merry Christmas. All that was missing for it to be accurately be described as war would be dead bodies, killing, armed struggle, territorial dispute, and people’s lives being physically in jeopardy in any way at all.

Luckily, this year the story moved on to something else, which ties somewhat in to the main topic of this post. I’ve seen story after story of schoolteacher, pastor, busdriver, and hall monitor telling younsters that Santa doesn’t exist. I’m curious whether it was a media meme (like the black churches burning in the 90’s and the shark attacks of 2000-01) or whether a disproportionate number of people decided to be idiots this Holiday Season.

So anyway, it’s a little late, but Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Happy Kwanzaa, Happy Honukkah, Happy Winter Solstice, or whatever else may float your boat!