I liken Christmas to my 4-year-old niece. In small doses it can be sweet and endearing, but it's also capable of being shrill and annoying. Since I don't really have any true obligations to Christmas, if it bothers me too much I can just ignore it. I suppose that's why I'm capable of going through what should be the most insufferable time of the year in a relative state of calm. Sure, for the first ten years of my life Christmas seemed extremely appealing, but then I realized that it's a gaudy chunk of unnecessary stress that becomes less interesting the older you get. The one part of the holiday season I always enjoy is the pointless whining about the War on Christmas. Conservative idiots like Bill O'Reilly and other drains on society who hate fun usually start jabbering in late November about how the Christiest holiday of them all has been actively secularized for the sake of money and mass appeal. That's why the fundies spend every December launching increasingly absurd campaigns to inject some extra religion into their favorite holiday. This year, it's the CHRIST-mas Tree.

That's right, Boss Creations, a new company founded by a scary dingbat named Marsha Boggs, hit the market with a new twist on the old Tenenbaum. It's a full-size Christmas tree being literally crushed by a giant, wood crucifix to apparently remind everyone what the holiday is really about...

...except it's not. Now, maybe my understanding of Christian theology has been tainted by years of brutal conflict between Christmas and the vague forces of secular evil, but it's my understanding that the December 25th holiday celebrates when a magical baby was born among horse leavings, not when that baby grew up and was murdered by some Romans in a way that makes Abu Ghraib look like Disneyland. I know Christian fundamentalists like their torture porn just like everyone else, but there's something unacceptably morbid about commemorating a birth with a big, tacky reminder of slow, agonizing death.

Then there's the issue of the inherent hypocrisy of Boss Creations. If Crazy-Pants Boggs and her employees really wanted to fight the secular commercialization of Christmas, wouldn't they be giving these awful trees away instead of charging 300 bones for one with the vague, commitment-free promise to donate a portion of the proceeds to charity?

Speaking of prostituting your religion for fame and profit, famed televangelist and owner of a deeply unfortunate name Oral Roberts bit the big one today at age 91. For those of you who either weren't alive in the 1980's or just haven't heard about this guy, Oral Roberts is the fella who went on national television and told everyone that God was going to kill him if he didn't raise $8 million for a medical center, even though he popularized the concept of faith healing and ended up closing that medical center a mere three years after he opened it.

Seeing as God "called home" Oral Roberts just shortly after Boss Creations unleashed the CHRIST-mas Tree, I have a sneaking suspicion that God Himself, not the secular materialist complex, is waging war on Christmas. It's a justified war, too. If a bunch of people ran around using your name in a quest to be history's most dangerous extortionist idiots, you'd call down some wrath, too.