Rants.

Thoughts on Christmas by Ben Stein.

Herewith at this happy time of year, a few confessions from my beating heart:

I have no freaking clue who Nick and Jessica are. I see them on the cover of People and Us constantly when I am buying my dog biscuits and kitty litter. I often ask the checkers at the grocery stores. They never know who Nick and Jessica are either. Who are they? Will it change my life if I know who they are and why they have broken up? Why are they so important? I don't know who Lindsay Lohan is, either, and I do not care at all about Tom Cruise's wife.

Am I going to be called before a Senate committee and asked if I am a subversive? Maybe, but I just have no clue who Nick and Jessica are. Is this what it means to be no longer young. It's not so bad.

Next confession: I am a Jew, and every single one of my ancestors was Jewish. And it does not bother me even a little bit when people call those beautiful lit up, bejeweled trees Christmas trees. I don't feel threatened. I don't feel discriminated against. That's what they are: Christmas trees. It doesn't bother me a bit when people say, "Merry Christmas" to me. I don't think they are slighting me or getting ready to put me in a ghetto. In fact, I kind of like it. It shows that we are all brothers and sisters celebrating this happy time of year. It doesn't bother me at all that there is a manger scene on display at a key intersection near my beach house in Malibu. If people want a creche, it's just as fine with me as is the Menorah a few hundred yards away.

I don't like getting pushed around for being a Jew and I don't think Christians like getting pushed around for being Christians. I think people who believe in God are sick and tired of getting pushed around, period. I have no idea where the concept came from that America is an explicitly atheist country. I can't find it in the Constitution and I don't like it being shoved down my throat.

Or maybe I can put it another way: where did the idea come from that we should worship Nick and Jessica and we aren't allowed to worship God as we understand Him?

I guess that's a sign that I'm getting old, too. But there are a lot of us who are wondering where Nick and Jessica came from and where the America we knew went to.

I was recently forwarded this Rant in an email (sadly it also came with more thoughts that while good, were not written by Ben Stein, but only attributed to him -- please always double check the validity of your forwards!), and thought it expressed a lot of what I feel around the holidays -- many seem very worried about how Christmas is going to offend people. At the library where I work, there's been complaints from staff about how we shouldn't label any of the items "Christmas" unless we're going to add a label for every other holiday out there, too. The irony of this argument is that we do put labels on other genres -- but the ones that have enough material to justify adding new labels. There are Christmas labels for both adult and youth material, but Easter labels only for youth, as Adult doesn't contain enough Easter material to have a section devoted entirely to it. We have a Mystery section. A Science Fiction section, we also label Hanukkah items in Children's. The labels are to make it easier to find the desired items, not to make anyone feel uncomfortable. If books on Cinco de Mayo were wildly popular here, and we stocked hundreds of items on them, I'm sure we'd have a Cinco de Mayo section, too, but as it stands, there are 6, and having a section for 6 books really doesn't make sense.

God bless, and Merry Christmas.