In the warm spirit of the season, President Donald Trump chose once more to divide the nation rather than unite us.
The man who found goodness and light among the neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville a few months ago reminded us with the arrival of Christmas that there is darkness in the very mention of other people’s religious greetings – or the simple phrase “Happy holidays” — if it somehow restrains us from uttering the phrase, “Merry Christmas.”
On Saturday, he tweeted that people are “proud to be saying Merry Christmas again,” thus bringing back into the English language a phrase that had never, for even a moment, disappeared.
“I am proud to have led the charge against the assault of our cherished and beautiful phrase,” he said, thus contributing to the dangerous and divisive myth that anyone, anywhere in America, ever attempted to assault or even diminish such language.
Instead, the leader of the planet’s great melting pot hinted that his predecessor, President Barack Obama, would not utter such words – even though cable news stations have been running video clips from the last eight years showing Obama and his wife Michelle saying, “Merry Christmas,” over and over again.
The difference is, when the occasion was right, the Obamas also recognized there are other religions in the great American mix and chose to acknowledge those as well as Christmas.
Like it kills anybody to say “Happy Chanukah” or “Happy Kwanzaa” or even “Happy holidays” to people who celebrate their own tribes’ beliefs.
Assault on Christmas, indeed.
And whom are we to believe might have been behind such a war on Christianity?
The phony war was a marketing ploy invented by the geniuses at Fox News to juice their ratings. They invented it, and then they ran with it over a series of Christmas seasons, until this president, who reportedly spends many of his waking hours glued to the television set listening to Fox’s political sycophants, picked it up as a tool of his own.
Not that we need it, but Trump’s words are one more reminder of one of his greatest shortcomings as president – he consistently reaches for ways to divide this polyglot nation, and has rarely, if ever, uttered words to unite us, to bring forth what Lincoln famously called “the better angels of our nature.”
Now is the season when our Christian brothers and sisters embrace the spirit of angels. We wish them all a hearty Merry Christmas. There, we said it, and nobody ever intended to stop us – now, or ever.
And we lament the tragedy that this president chooses to bring any notion of war into a season of peace.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” has just been re-issued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
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