Guest Cover Story

Ghosts of Christmas Past

By John Burtis
Saturday, December 3, 2005

With my wife out of town, I find myself watching Andre Rieu and listening to Christmas carols. And as I sip my cocoa, I'm transported back some fifty years to my early childhood into what now almost seems like an alien country.

It is Christmastime and as the snow falls outside, in a room illuminated by a yellow electric candle reflected on the frosty window, my mother reads the story of the Christ child to me from the Children's Bible. It has been a busy evening as carolers visited my grandmother, disabled for many years, singing "Silent Night," and "Angels We Have Heard on High." My kid brother and I have have helped my folks trim the Christmas tree, and the old man has hung the stockings over the fireplace. On Christmas Ever we will attend the late service at the Methodist Church and sing the final hymns outside. The snow means a wonderland tomorrow.

As my mother finishes reading she begins singing a lullaby to me and I drift off into a contented sleep.

But awakening tonight, I realize that somewhere along the way, we have all lost our way. We are war with ourselves, our country, our value system, and each other. Politics has become a true war of ideologies, made ever more stark in this Christmas season, with trees banned, red and green outlawed, free speech under attack, and Christianity under the gun worldwide. Tolerance has given way to carping and has moved on to hatred.

And in the dull drab colorless socialist "paradise" which the Democratic party is in such a hurry to have us inhabit, Christmas carols would be rare indeed, to say nothing of the laws banning Christian carolers from singing their way through neighborhoods. Colored lights in windows would be sparse in number, if not banned altogether, as would the pretty paper under even scarcer "holiday" trees. Bibles, like the treasured books in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, would be passed down by word of mouth by the faithful where they'd gather surreptitiously in basements and attic hideaways, like Christians of old in the catacombs, following the end of their sale and their public confiscation. A politicized police force is powerless to prevent roving bands of Muslim toughs from roughing up identifiable Christians. Churches have been closed and have been sold or taken over by the bureaucratic state. But the Nomenklatura, made up of the Hollywood glitterati, the millionaire fops and poseurs, and pet politicians, would glide around in secure limousines, while we proles and plebes, in our rags, would scuttle about in their headlights.

I don't know where we're heading in America, but based on the evidence the portents are not good. Politicians openly deride our troops and encourage our enemies. The ACLU is hell bent on the destruction of Christianity and elimination of free speech. Public school administrators and school boards have become willing dupes and race headlong in the furtherance of these same goals, while teachers both practice and preach all manner of sexual perversion at the expense of any semblance of learning. The main stream "press" is neither "main stream" nor accurate, and their prevarications and innuendoes in the promotion of these same dangerous ideals are so outrageous that only the limited education of the masses of those educated in the public schools prevents a greater hue and cry. Happiness has given way to the bleak cheerlessness, the contrived trumpery and the outright demagoguery of our "liberal" politicians, who are, after all, in league with the very same media.

It is Christmas and I doubt that the carolers will ever visit me again. It has grown too dangerous in America today to sing songs of joy on our streets in this, our most joyous season. And as I drink my cocoa, it makes me sad.