December 19, 2013

The Origin of the War on Christmas

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I’m thinking about switching to Chrome as my default browser, but first I need to check and see if I can still blog successfully using it. It’s not officially supported by MoJo’s tech staff, you see. So I need something to write about.

I know! How about the War on Christmas™? Dan Amira shares with us the video clip on the right, which is certainly amusing. It turns out that Fox News, which is ground zero for outrage over this stuff, airs house spots that wish everyone “Happy Holidays.” Hah!

But I have a question. The conservative take on all this is that “Happy Holidays” is some kind of secular leftist plot. Or a multi-culti plot. Or something. But at least as far back as when I was a kid, we got cards wishing us “Holiday Greetings” or “Greetings of the Season,” or some such. And since we were all one big Christian nation back then, and no one cared about Eid or Kwanzaa or atheists or even Hanukkah, really, I always assumed that this particular greeting was about New Year’s. “Happy Holidays” meant you were including both Christmas and New Year’s, not that you were including Christmas and some godless pagan festival.

Am I crazy? Or is that where it started?

POSTSCRIPT: In case you’re wondering, Chrome seems to work fine, as you can see by the fact that this post exists. Oddly, though, our (supposedly) WYSIWYG editor and preview function don’t display YouTube embeds in Chrome. In fact, this particular embed didn’t even show up when I published the post. Then after a few minutes it finally did. But even then, it still didn’t show up when I went back into editing mode. That’s pretty strange.

Everything else seems to work fine, though Chrome lacks some useful features I’ve gotten used to. But I guess that’s life.

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We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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