The War on Christmas Comes to Wow Wow Toaster, Wisconsin
“This IS a f**king CHRISTIAN nation” and other tributes to the birth of Jesus.
IN HIS FOX NEWS PROGRAM ON NOVEMBER 13, Jesse Watters mused about what he called a “holiday tradition”: The war on Christmas. He observed, with palpable glee, that “Now it feels like the war on Christmas is coming earlier and earlier every year. Probably climate change.” Ha, ha.
Watters proceeded to give all of two examples of what he called “opening shots” and “complete sneak attacks” in this year’s war. One was that “a guy [who] runs a healthcare company” in Georgia was “canceling Christmas Eve,” by no longer treating it as a company holiday.
The other example of this dastardly trend was in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee whose name he badly mispronounced. (It’s “Wah-wuh-TOE-suh,” not “Wah-wah-TWO-suh,” although, to be fair, Watters came closer than did Bob Dylan in an early, unfinished song about Wisconsin: “Wow Wow Toaster.”) There, Deputy City Administrator Melissa Cantarero Weiss, Watters said, “told city workers to not put up any Christmas-related decor on public property.”
Watters quoted from Weiss’s Nov. 9 email memo to city employees. “In our ongoing efforts to foster a more equitable and inclusive community,” it said, “we kindly ask that departments refrain from using religious decorations solely associated with Christmas, such as red and green lights.” She suggested some “more neutral and inclusive decorations,” like lights and greenery, snowflakes, and “snow people.”
The email memo issued no directives and warned of no consequences. It pertained only to “public spaces within city buildings,” like the counters where people queue for various civic services. But within days of Weiss’s email going out, the story of how Wauwatosa had declared war on Christmas was picked up around the world, beginning with a November 11 report on the conservative news outlet Wisconsin Right Now, which posted the memo along with Weiss’s name, photo, a link to her LinkedIn profile, and her email address. (More on this later.)
The Daily Mail of London ran an article under the screaming headline: “Snowflakes! Woke Wisconsin council sparks outrage after instructing staff to avoid red and green decorations in public buildings and replacing religious ornaments with ‘snow people.’” The headline for Breitbart’s story declared, “Wisconsin City Bans Employees from Hanging ‘Religious Decorations’ to Be ‘Inclusive’” and referred to Weiss’s memo as an “anti-Christian email.” And this social media post by the far-right Libs of TikTok (which was reposted by former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, a longtime Wauwatosa resident, who dubbed it “Wokewatosa”) garnered more than five million views in just a few days:
Fox Across America host Jimmy Failla, who joined Watters for the war on Christmas segment, joked about how it wasn’t enough to just neuter snowmen: “If we’re going to start there, you’ve got to cancel Frosty completely. Why? He has two eyes made out of coal, destroying the planet.” (Rimshot, please.) But Failla went on to stress that this issue was no laughing matter: “This is the biggest problem facing the country. Woke white people have become cultural arsonists. They set fires where nobody cared just to show the rest of us how enlightened they are by putting out the blaze.”
The biggest problem facing the country?
On the same day as the Fox report, Liberty Counsel, a nonprofit Christian advocacy group, fired off a letter to the city of Wauwatosa demanding “the immediate retraction of the unconstitutional ban on Christmas holiday symbols, decorations, and expression.” It ended, predictably, with a threat: “If the city fails to respond disavowing the directive, or ratifies it, Liberty Action will take additional action to prevent irreparable harm to cherished liberties.”
On November 15, as reported by the Washington Times, Wauwatosa City Administrator Jim Archambo wrote city workers to clarify that Weiss’s message was not a “requirement to decorate or not decorate a certain way” and did not prevent workers from decorating their “individual work spaces” as they wished.
Mat Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, claimed victory: “Now the city employees can celebrate the Christmas holiday consistent with their faith and the law.”
God bless us, every one!
DESPITE BEING LARGELY IMAGINARY, the war on Christmas has been hugely successful in its goal of promoting an Us v. Them mentality—with Us being true Americans and Them being wild-eyed, out-of-control leftists.
The term gained currency following the publication of a 2005 book by John Gibson titled The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought. Gibson, in a holiday-season appearance that year on Fox News, explained the danger like this: “Every time a supermarket checker or store clerk greets you with [‘Happy Holidays’] instead of ‘Merry Christmas,’ you have met another soldier in the war against Christmas.”
The show’s host, Bill O’Reilly, said the goal of these anti-Christian soldiers was to “get religion out, [so] then you can pass secular progressive programs like legalization of narcotics, euthanasia, abortion at will, and gay marriage.”
Washington Post columnist Philip Bump, in a recent piece responding to Watters’s rehashing of the war on Christmas theme, notes that mentions of the war have declined significantly in recent years, presumably due to the paucity of fresh examples. But that has not stopped people like Watters from seizing every last opportunity to sound off about it. As Bump wrote:
[The] “earlier and earlier” framing is meant to trigger the response he and Fox News generally seek, a sense of encroachment on their values and beliefs. The “war on Christmas” was really a precursor to Fox’s and the broader right’s fearmongering about “wokeism.” It’s the same argument—look what they’re doing to us!—with the same methodology: Here are two anecdotes that show how we’re under attack!
The notion that Christmas (and, by extension, Christianity) is facing an existential threat, Bump noted, is “an artifice invented by people like Watters whose influence depends on inventing new reasons to be mad at the outside world.” It is also part of a successful strategy to push Christian conservatives to support as fundamentally un-Christian a character as Donald Trump.
Wauwatosa Mayor Dennis McBride, in a statement on the brouhaha, began by saying he did not respond as quickly as he might have “because I was singing in my church choir.” He explained that neither he nor the city council had anything to do with the email that was sent out, as the Daily Mail headline falsely stated. But he had looked into the matter and learned that “in years past, some people who have come to City Hall in November and December have complained about religious displays.” He said city administrators were merely trying to address this “to minimize the discomfort that some people feel when they come to a government building for governmental, non-religious functions.”
Or, as McBride told me when we spoke, “City hall’s not a church.”
That’s a good thing, given some of the messages that people who purport to be Christians have been sending to city employees about the memo.
LAST WEEK, IN RESPONSE TO MY REQUEST under Wisconsin’s open records law, McBride and City Attorney Alan Kesner released the many dozens of emails on this topic that the mayor’s office has received. Most were from people outside of Wauwatosa. A fair number of the people writing in seemed to think that Wauwatosa was, as one person put it, “actually trying to eliminate Christmas” by banning Christmas decorations citywide.
Some of these emails offer what passes nowadays for polite dissent, along the lines of “Your new WOKE Christmas decoration policy is an embarrassment and disgrace to this city” and “Your city letter prohibiting the use of traditional Christmas colors has made you a national, and even international, laughingstock.”
But there were also emails from people getting into the holiday spirit with statements like these (some of which have been shortened, though original spellings and punctuation have been preserved):
What is wrong with you? Do you hate our savior Jesus Christ? You worship the Devil?
Change red and green colors to SNOW PEOPLE?
YOU Grinch destroying Christmas how dare you.Why has your city outlawed Christmas?
Please relay my sentiments to those who support interfering with our freedoms- stuff your collective heads the rest of the way up their fat asses!!!!
Christmas has been celebrated since Jesus birth. It’s a Federal holiday. What will you be celebrating in its place. Drag queen town USA? You are making a decision that the God of the Universe won’t take lightly. He won’t be mocked. Your blessings will be removed from your town because he will not let this go.
This IS a f**king CHRISTIAN nation now, is, and ALWAYS WILL BE! If ANYONE IS OFFENDED by OUR Christian culture then it is THEY that need to ASSIMILATE to OUR culture, they’re on OUR SOIL! PLAIN AND SIMPLE! Majority RULES!
And there was this, from someone who managed to misspell his own first name:
What in the fuck is wrong with the city not wanting red and green for Christmas? Fear colors?
Go back to Russia at least there they like red . Joh Gallagher Ps. Your city should be asmed of themselves.
BUT THESE EMAILS TO THE MAYOR pale in comparison to the onslaught directed at Weiss. The deputy administrator, whose email address was included in the Wisconsin Right Now story to which other media referred, received what Kesner tallied were 312 missives on this matter. He released them to me last Friday in response to a records request. The text filled 347 pages. Here are some of the Christmas tidings that Weiss received. (As with the above emails, some have been shortened, but they are otherwise unedited.)
Melissa, You are a disgusting bitch. Fuck you
Do everyone a favor and shut the hell up. You’re a disgrace to your family and this country.
Literally shut. Thee. Fuck. Up. You uneducated soft ass little girl.
You are truly a wack job and need to be removed from your position. I pray every wauwatosa employee ignores your ignorant nazi directive to avoid green and red decorations and the use of the term snowmen. You are a fucking Embarrassment to the human race.
Congratulations! You are single-handedly going to make me pro Hamas re: your email to city employees!
Go fuck yourself.Are you fucking kidding me? Congrats on being one of the many reasons that Americans hate their governments, their leaders, and anything the left has to say. You dumb cunt.
Go to hell you un american piece of gutter garbage cunt!!
We love the red and green, We love Christmas , there are only snowmen, and there are only TWO genders!!
Fuck out of here with all that faggot queer multi-gender garbage!!I hope you have the shittiest Holiday season in your life! I hope it is ripe with shit.
Fuck you
fuck your mom and
fuck the POS dad that bred you. Oh and tell that twat Archambo he can go fuck himself too!! Merry Christmas!I hope you and your family die in a car wreck with a drunk illegal alien you commie bitch.
MERRY FUCKING CHRISTMAS!
Who the hell are you bitch? You have ZERO authority to tell ANY BODY to NOT celebrate CHRISTMAS!!!
I WILL PUT UP DECORATIONS IF I WANT TO!!!!
THIS NATION WAS BUILT BY CHRISTIANS FOR CHRISTIANS AND CHRISTMAS IS OUR HIGH HOLY RELIGIOUS TIME!!!
YOU COMMIE BIGOT HATERS CAN GET OUT!!!
RESIGN NOW BITCH!!!!!
APOLOGIZE TO ALL OF US AND GET OUT!!!If you don’t want people to partake in Christmas celebrations, move to a Muslim or Communist country , WHORE, WHATCH YOUR STEP.
If you don’t like Christmas, eat shit. Or celebrate that fake ass holiday called Kwanza. Dumb ass.
WTF is wrong with you and your Socialist, biggot staff!!! You dont deserve to even breath the same air as your residents!!!
You are nothing more than a piece of shit, and I state that because you are shitting on the majority just like all the other libtard hippies.
Saw your email, we will decorate for CHRISTMAS as we see fit. If this offends you then TOUGH SHIT.
MERRY FUCKING CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY GOD DAMN NEW YEAR.Leave Christmas alone you satanic lesbian.
You are an anti-christian bigot and we will make it our life's mission to ensure that your hatred defines you and even your great great grandchildren see the story of your hate email hating Christmas as the first 8,000 internet search results for your name even in 200 years’ time. There can be no forgiveness for your woke cult, which is destroying civilization. You are the enemy.
You are now on the list. You know whats next, right?
Stop with your leftist faggotry you disgusting [n-word] loving kike. [N-word plural] are animals and they dont belong in our society outside a zoo. I hope the diversity you love so much has its first effects on your family. And theres only two genders. You ugly fucking whore.
How does that hymn go again? Ah, yes: “And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love. Yes, they’ll know we are Christians by our love.”
THERE WERE MANY MORE EMAILS like the ones above, as well as some that registered their dissent without resorting to expletives or threats—things like “You and your Ilk don’t deserve to live in this country!” Quite a few aggressively wished Weiss a Merry Christmas, but with no F-bomb attached. Here’s an example:
Merry CHRISTMAS The jacklegs that hates Christmas needs reeducation. He/She/They are being divisive and non inclusive with regards to those who celebrate the birth of CHRIST, OUR LORD AND SAVIOR. [. . .] Enough already. You might as well say to China come invade our town, we've surrendered our intelligence, our backbone and our commitment to Jesus Christ.
Also finding their way into Weiss’s inbox were a few supportive messages. Here’s one:
Just a note of thanks and support for your efforts to ensure a feeling of welcome at city hall and the library in this winter holiday season. Just know that I and many other citizens support these efforts to insure diversity and inclusion.
Here’s another:
I am sure you are overwhelmed by all the negativity, but I would like to say thank you for your efforts to make City Hall more inclusive. I’m sorry the assholes of Wauwatosa (and outside of Wauwatosa, b/c let’s face it, there are fearful assholes everywhere) have harassed you. Please know you are APPRECIATED.
And this:
I’m sorry to hear about the pushback that you are receiving on your ideas to diversify holiday decorating. I hope you know and feel the support of so many community members who are 100% behind you and appreciate your work!
Thank you for your vision of an inclusive Wauwatosa.
It just goes to show that, even in Wauwatosa in 2023, the spirit of Christmas is still alive, whether right-wing believers and Fox News commentators like it or not.
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