Juno News - December 24, 2018


Is the War on Christmas real？


Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

174.60318

Word count

770

Sentence count

47

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Andrew Lawton talks about the war on Christmas and why we should celebrate the season even if it means saying Merry Christmas back to people who don't celebrate it. Merry Christmas and God bless you and Merry Christmas!

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.360 Every year around this time we see a very similar narrative unfold in the media.
00:00:05.120 People on the right will decry the war on Christmas, people on the left will say the war on Christmas is just a work of conservative fiction,
00:00:12.260 a boogeyman meant to rile people up and generate outrage for no particular reason.
00:00:17.620 And to be honest, I think the truth is somewhere in the middle.
00:00:20.420 I don't think there's a war on Christmas per se, but there is a war on common sense.
00:00:25.280 And I think a lot of time that actually rears itself specifically around Christmas.
00:00:31.760 Undeniably, there are stories that we see year after year where someone or some company or some school will make a very anti-Christmas declaration.
00:00:40.460 We've seen lots of them this year from the school principal that banned candy canes because they look like the letter J for Jesus.
00:00:47.360 And we see all the time radio stations that are saying, well, we won't play anything that has a Christian theme.
00:00:53.960 Or this year, baby, it's cold outside.
00:00:56.840 Well, look, Justin Trudeau, the prime minister, gave Christmas declarations his last few years in office.
00:01:02.160 And a couple of them didn't even mention Christianity or Jesus, which is kind of the reason for the season, as they say.
00:01:09.260 There are lots of these examples, but do they indicate a full-throated war on Christmas?
00:01:13.740 And if so, who is it that's actually behind it?
00:01:17.000 There are lots of people that want to say that people are coming from other parts of the world and saying that you can't say Merry Christmas.
00:01:22.660 Well, let me tell you something.
00:01:24.380 The people who are actually stoking this fire are white secular liberals.
00:01:29.700 It's not the Muslims. 1.00
00:01:31.140 They don't care about us celebrating Christmas.
00:01:33.000 It's not the Jews. 1.00
00:01:33.780 They don't care about us celebrating Christmas.
00:01:35.760 It's these white secular liberals, these people that just want to take away anything that might cause offense to others, even if that offense isn't actually being caused.
00:01:44.980 And let me share with you a story from my own life.
00:01:47.100 Every year, I make it a bit of a tradition when I go over to my parents' house for Christmas morning to stop and get coffee from one of the nearby Tim Hortons that might be open on Christmas Day.
00:01:57.240 And two years, I went to one where the same woman was working. 0.99
00:02:00.580 A woman working on Christmas morning, serving coffee to people like me, wearing a Santa hat over top of her hijab.
00:02:07.280 A Muslim woman who very beamingly says Merry Christmas to everyone who goes through.
00:02:13.040 She doesn't care that I celebrate Christmas because I don't care that she doesn't.
00:02:17.700 And that's what makes the Christmas season, and indeed, that's what makes a pluralistic society great.
00:02:23.020 People leave each other alone.
00:02:25.100 You don't have to share someone's views to respect that they have them.
00:02:28.840 And you don't need to feel that you celebrating something comes at the expense of something else.
00:02:34.580 And this is what that CBC writer missed the memo on a few weeks back, where she says that, you know, maybe we need to tone down the Christmas and focus more on Kwanzaa and Hanukkah and Diwali and all of these other things.
00:02:46.280 Well, it's great to focus on those things if you believe in those things.
00:02:50.280 But we're fooling ourselves as a society if we think that the majority of people don't celebrate Christmas.
00:02:55.820 Christians celebrate it because of the religious connotations, but even non-Christians celebrate it because of the cultural impact that it has.
00:03:03.760 And Christmas is very unique.
00:03:05.140 It's the only holiday of its kind that is actually celebrated by people who oftentimes believe in a religion or belief system that is different than the one that actually spawned Christmas.
00:03:16.560 And that itself makes it magical.
00:03:18.520 So if you do feel there is a war on Christmas, let's fight it the one way we can.
00:03:24.620 Again, by ignoring the war.
00:03:27.500 No one's telling you not to say Merry Christmas.
00:03:29.920 Maybe they're telling some retail clerks.
00:03:31.940 But if someone says Merry Christmas to you, say Merry Christmas back.
00:03:35.300 If you think the world needs more merriment in this time of year, you make sure that you tell everyone who will listen, Merry Christmas.
00:03:41.700 That's how we fight the war on Christmas.
00:03:43.600 By rolling our eyes at anyone, even if they are in a minority, that thinks that we shouldn't celebrate this tremendous time of year.
00:03:49.800 For the True North Initiative, I'm Andrew Lawton.
00:03:52.500 Merry Christmas and God bless you.
00:03:54.620 Merry Christmas and God bless you.