What I Won’t Be Discussing at Christmas Dinner

This is tough time of year for me. There’s so much to talk about, and yet, bringing up virtually anything that’s in the news will start a shouting match at family gatherings.

For example, I can’t talk about voting machines. I can’t mention all the recent problems with Diebold, the company whose machines counted millions of votes in the 2004 election. I can’t mention the class-action lawsuits from investors, accusing the company of making misleading statements that led to artificially high stock prices. I can’t mention that California now refuses to recertify Deibold machines until they’ve passed more rigorous testing, or that the machines were easily hacked in a demonstration in Florida. I can’t mention that the company’s controversial CEO resigned last week.

I can’t talk about illegal spying on Americans, even though it would be interesting to quote from this Kevin Drum post and ask this very reasonable question: If the president believes he’s allowed extralegal powers during wartime, how is wartime defined? Haven’t we been continuously at war with somebody since we entered World War II?

I can’t talk about intelligent design, particularly U.S. District Judge John E. Jones’ smackdown of the Dover, Pennsylvania, school-board members who testified in the trial:

“It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.”

I can’t bring up the mendacious, deliberately polarizing notion of a “war on Christmas,” not even to mention that many of our most beloved Christmas songs were written during a world war, as Harold Meyerson points out in this terrific Washington Post column:

“White Christmas” [written in 1941] is an achingly nostalgic ballad, evoking a rural America where treetops glisten and sleigh bells ring. This was Currier and Ives country, an idealized winter landscape created for an urban nation that was busily shipping its young men overseas to fight Hitler and Japan. Amid the unprecedented disruptions of the war, “White Christmas,” with its implicit assertion that we can somehow get back to this innocent Eden, found a ready audience. Over the subsequent six decades, in a world that’s only grown more unstable, [Irving] Berlin’s ode has never lost its power: Roughly 2,000 versions have been recorded since Bing Crosby’s initial take.

The success of “White Christmas” paved the way for a whole new genre of Christmas songs. Two years after Berlin’s ballad first appeared in Paramount’s Holiday Inn, MGM filmed Meet Me in St. Louis, which had as its musical centerpiece the bittersweet “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” — a song about loved ones trying to stay together “if the fates allow.” (A film ahead of its time, Meet Me in St. Louis is about a family resisting corporate relocation.) Two years later came “The Christmas Song” (“Chestnuts roasting on an open fire”), and a year after that, “Let It Snow.” By then the American Christmas song was about staying warm in winter, about staying connected to loved ones and traditions.

Staying connected to loved ones and traditions? Sure sounds subversive to me.

I can’t mention that American teenagers are still abusing prescription drugs at high rates, despite the general, positive trend toward lower rates of smoking, drinking, and abuse of illegal drugs. I can’t mention that teen abuse of oxycontin is rising, at a time when abuse of most other substances is either holding steady or declining. And I absolutely can’t bring up the poster boy for oxycontin abuse.

Maybe I’ll just talk about the weather … and try not to mention this.

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