World War On Christmas

The planet doesn’t care if you say Happy Holidays.

Are you familiar with the War on Christmas? It’s the idea that, in these fraught times, mainstream culture is trying to erase Christianity from the Christmas season. The word “holiday” is a big point of contention in this war. Holiday cards and holiday parties instead of Christmas cards and Christmas parties are an affront. Starbucks cups, for some reason, are another popular battleground for many pontificators. But there’s one source of anti-Christmas activity getting a lot less coverage—take a peek at this recent animal news:

• Squirrels in Boston keep chewing through the Christmas lights on the city’s big tree. Every year, the city of Boston lights a big tree in the Common for people to visit and generate content beside. This year, though, the lights on their 47-foot white spruce keep going out. Apparently local squirrels are biting into the wires because they love the taste of copper—but couldn’t it also be that they’re trying to destroy everyone’s Christmas cheer?
• Global warming is causing reindeer to shrink. Warmer climates mean more rain than snow during the Arctic winter, which means the primary sources of deer food are either freezing and thawing over and over again, or covered in mud from the runoff. Less food means smaller reindeer, and smaller reindeer means fewer successful pregnancies. So the worldwide reindeer population is effectively shrinking while it’s shrinking. If all of that sounds too hypothetical, the BBC just reported that Earth’s largest reindeer herd has lost 400,000 of its 1 million members in the last 16 years. Is climate change… anti-Christmas? In order to save Santa’s business model, do we need to… save the environment?

I’m not saying all Boston squirrels and the entire planetary ecosystem might be anti-Christmas, but it’s certainly worth looking into.