FIGHT THE POWER! How a Laid-Back California Beach Town Emerged as Headquarters for the Anti-Newsom Resistance.

When a slate of Republicans worked together in 2022 to win back control of the Huntington Beach, Calif., city council, the four candidates signed a “contract” with voters. Most of the planks weren’t particularly controversial: They pledged to combat homelessness, crack down on crime, slash red tape, and roll out the red carpet to businesses.

But it was the first plank of the contract — a vow to give the city attorney the authority to fight Sacramento overreach, including state housing mandates — that has in many ways come to define an aggressive new brand of Surf City politics.

After taking over the board, those Republicans have transformed this laid-back beach community into the unofficial headquarters of the resistance to Governor Gavin Newsom and the blue-state policies championed by the Democrats who run the state. Huntington Beach leaders have repeatedly fought the state in court over laws they believe infringe on their rights to govern locally, and they’ve passed laws of their own taking aim at left-wing shibboleths, including Pride flags, Covid masks, and sexually-explicit library books.

The populist pushback is almost certain to intensify over the coming years after a slate of three more conservatives romped the council’s last three liberals on Election Day, giving them a 7–0 board supermajority. They celebrated on swearing-in day, donning red “Make Huntington Beach Great Again” hats with “7–0” embroidered on the side — a not-so-subtle poke in the eye to their left-wing critics.

Councilman Tony Strickland, a former Republican state assemblyman, dubbed the new majority the “MAGA-nificent 7.”

But while there will almost surely be plenty of more fights to be had as Newsom sets himself up for a likely 2028 presidential run, Pat Burns, a councilman who is now serving as Huntington Beach’s mayor, insists that despite their rambunctious reputation, sparring with the governor isn’t his and the board’s primary mission.

While Newsom begins any presidential election bid with a guaranteed 54 electoral college votes, from a state that as Dave Barry recently wrote, “apparently tabulates its ballots on a defective Etch-a-Sketch,” meaning it can come up with any result Sacramento chooses to manufacture, the anti-California commercials his opponents will craft will be loads of fun to watch. Or as Joel Kotkin asks and answers: California ruled with great jobs and boom times. What happened?

DAVE BARRY’S YEAR IN REVIEW: 2024 was an exciting year, and by ‘exciting,’ we mean ‘stupid.’

Yet another federal budget crisis is averted [in March] at the last minute when Congress passes a $1.2 trillion spending bill, which will enable the government to keep spending insanely more money than it takes in. The U.S. debt is now growing at the rate of a trillion dollars every 100 days, but fortunately this is not a problem because it will be taken care of by future generations. “No problem! Just put it on our tab!” is the view of future generations, and that is why we love them.

In other high-finance news, Donald Trump’s lawyers tell a New York court that he cannot raise the nearly half-billion dollars he needs for an appeal bond, having been turned down by more than 30 bond companies and an individual known as Anthony “Tony Three Nostrils” Avocado. Trump gets a break when an appeals court lowers the amount to $175 million, which Trump says he definitely has, although he left it in his other pants.

In a possibly related development, Trump announces that he is selling—we are not making this up—“God Bless the USA” Bibles for $59.95 a pop.

“It’s my favorite book,” he states, moments before being struck by lightning.

No, that did not happen and you are a bad person for even fantasizing about it.

In aviation news, a Boeing plane flying from Australia to New Zealand suddenly goes into a nosedive, injuring 50 people. Another Boeing plane, taking off from the San Francisco airport, loses a piece of landing gear. A Boeing spokesperson says that the company, after conducting an in-depth review, has tentatively identified the root cause of the recent problems.

“We think it’s gravity,” said the spokesperson. “It seems to be getting worse.” As a safety precaution, Boeing is advising pilots to avoid taking off, and simply taxi the planes from city to city, which the spokesperson says “may result in delays, especially to overseas destinations.”

Or as America’ Newspaper of Record reported earlier this year:

Boeing CEO Assures Nervous Fliers That All 737 Aircraft Are Built To The Highest Diversity Standards #BestOfTheBest2024 https://t.co/8X4G2Sc9bw

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) December 27, 2024

DEVELOPING: Man found on fire at Penn Station is rushed to hospital with burn injuries.

A man found on fire at Penn Station was rushed to the hospital with burn injuries Friday, cops said.

A passerby alerted two MTA police officers that a man was on fire at the bustling transit hub near W. 34th St. around 8:10 p.m., police said.

The man was on fire when police found him near the entrance to the Nos. 1, 2 and 3 trains, cops said.

Medics transported him to Weill Cornell Medical Center. His condition was not immediately available, cops and firefighters said.

It’s unclear how the man was set ablaze.

No word yet on whether this was a crime along the lines of last week’s attack on a woman in a Brooklyn subway car by a Guatemalan illegal immigrant, or if the man at Penn Station was drumming for Spinal Tap:

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: It’s Not Over ‘Til It’s Over Edition.

THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT A TRAIN THAT’S MAGIC[AL THINKING]: Amtrak probes claims of train leaving 100 stranded at DC’s Union Station.

A post on the Amtrak subreddit went viral after one user claimed that a train left without 100 passengers in Washington, D.C.

According to the Reddit post, the 10 p.m. Northeast Regional train departed Union Station without its lined-up passengers.

Passengers were notified to line up for boarding 20 minutes before the scheduled departure. However, by 10:15 p.m., they realized the train had already left.

The station manager reportedly stated that the train departed because no one boarded, but passengers contend that the gate to the platform was never opened to allow them access.

Assuming the Rededit post is based on a real incident, first class job by Choo-Choo Joe, and his transportation secretary, who was hired because he ticks an identity box and because he likes trains too:

Taxpayers pay more than $3 billion a year to fund a train service that is so incompetent it recently left a stop without all of its DC passengers, because Amtrak knows it doesn’t need to operate functionally or efficiently to stay in business. Defund it. https://t.co/Rj6EsFfDdF

— Billy Binion (@billybinion) December 27, 2024

THIS JUST IN:

In this column [Peggy] Noonan takes note of Biden’s patent incompetence to perform as president. Noonan recounts the story of Woodrow Wilson’s final years when Edith Wilson filled the president’s shoes. Gene Smith provided a popular account of the story in When the Cheering Stopped (1964). Noonan draws on Scott Berg’s biography Wilson (2014). It is at least worth noting in this context that I have referred to Jill Biden as “Edith” in posts extending back to “Quotations from Dementia Joe” (September 13, 2020).

I wish some cynical editor at the Journal had headlined Noonan’s column This Just In. Although it appears to have escaped Noonan’s notice, Biden’s decline has been visible to observers at least since since the 2020 presidential campaign. Mark Halperin states that he observed Biden’s senility up close in 2017. He hammers on Biden’s calling out to deceased Rep. Jackie Walorski at a White House event in September 2022: “Where’s Jackie?” This was in public over two years ago.

“Noonan calls herself a conservative,” but as Scott Johnson of Power Line wrote in August of 2020, she “all but endorsed Obama” at the end of October 2008, when it was obvious that Barry had the election virtually locked up, and Noonan wanted to jump aboard the bandwagon. During the 2020 election cycle she praised first Kamala Harris (“The daughter of East Bay professors grew up to become an excellent performer of politics,”) and then as Conrad Black observed in September of 2020, “Noonan’s decision to go full-metal-jacket for Joe Biden in the Wall Street Journal on Saturday opens a new flank in the Democratic assault on the incumbent president.”

Noonan would have regained some of the credibility she lost on the right for endorsing Obama if she had been willing during Biden’s term to consistently point out his obvious inability to lead, but that would risk being uninvited to Georgetown and Park Ave. cocktail parties.

UPDATE: Peggy Noonan Predicts A Romney Victory In The Most Anti-Nate Silver Column Imaginable.

Reason 4: Romney is winning the yard-sign battle, at least in Noonan’s eyes.

And there’s the thing about the yard signs. In Florida a few weeks ago I saw Romney signs, not Obama ones. From Ohio I hear the same. From tony Northwest Washington, D.C., I hear the same.

—Business Insider, November 5th, 2012.

21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Robot Romance Revealed: Women Will Be Having More Sex With Robots Than Men By 2025.

—The London Sun, June 30th, 2016.

If by chance women of the world actually are getting cybernetically jiggy with it en masse next year, nobody tell notorious robophobe Matthew Yglesias.

Flashback: “He seems to have a particular fear of fembots, the analysis of which I will leave to the professionals.”

ASSESS THIS:

According to “the dominant view” of the American intelligence community, the presence of the Wuhan Virology Institute in the town where the Covid virus originated was just a big coincidence. That’s how I would paraphrase this paragraph from the Wall Street Journal “Exclusive” “Behind Closed Doors: The Spy-World Scientists Who Argued Covid Was a Lab Leak.” The Journal reports:

The dominant view within the intelligence community was clear when Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, and a couple of her senior analysts, briefed Biden and his top aides on Aug. 24. The National Intelligence Council, a body of senior intelligence officers who reported to Haines and that organized the intelligence review, had concluded with “low confidence” that Covid-19 had emerged when the virus leapt from an animal to a human. So did four intelligence agencies.

That left the FBI hanging on a limb:

At the time, the FBI was the only agency that concluded a lab leak was likely, a judgment it had rendered with ‘moderate confidence.”

* * * * * * *

Biden appears more to be in China’s pocket rather than frustrated by China’s stonewalling, but it should have been hard to miss the centrality of the WIV. Senator Tom Cotton was on the case in February 2020 (video below).

https://youtu.be/ytGIkcCh7T8

Which is why, as with their massive coverup of Biden’s mental decline, the DNC-MSM circled the wagons and lied about the likely origins of Covid. The wrong people might benefit politically from the truth:

The media called it a racist conspiracy theory strictly because it was Tom Cotton who brought it up.

No other reason, and they won't go back on it now because that makes him right, and them insane. https://t.co/3mHu17gk7c

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) December 26, 2024

In less enlightened days, newspapers were called “the first draft of history” until they morphed in recent years into Democratic Party propaganda tools. If that’s to be their current role, those who determine the party line might want to give more thought as to how each modified limited hangout diminishes “journalism’s” credibility over the long run.

THE WASHINGTON FREE BEACON’S 2024 Man of the Year: Pierre Poilievre.

However Trudeau goes—resignation, no-confidence vote, American invasion of Ottawa—Poilievre is on-track to win big, with the Conservatives polling so well against the Liberals that he will almost certainly be Trudeau’s successor.

So let’s raise our beers, cook some back bacon, and salute Pierre Poilievre as the toppler of Trudeau the Terrible, a conservative who will Make Canada (Relatively) Great Again, a Washington Free Beacon Man of the Year, and the next governor of America’s soon-to-be 51st state.

Heh, indeed. Read the whole thing, eh.

HOT SHOE, BURNING DOWN THE AVENUE:

CNN: But what if it upsets Panama?@ScottJenningsKY (best retort ever): "Do I care if Panama is angry? What is Van Halen gonna com and be upset about it?…" pic.twitter.com/Tg6iuBiq9U

— Justin Hart (@justin_hart) December 27, 2024

UPDATE: GOP Rep Connects Dots for CNN Host Waiting for ‘Biden Crime Family’ Proof. (Cut to Commercial!)

NEW: CNN host abruptly ends segment after her defense of Joe Biden’s crimes completely falls apart.

ABBY PHILLIP: “I’m still waiting to see the proof of Joe Biden enriching himself. I take his brother and his son, perhaps.”

REP. MIKE LAWLER: “I’ll give you the direct line. A… pic.twitter.com/MgskTTKP5O

— The Vigilant Fox 🦊 (@VigilantFox) December 27, 2024

IN YOUR FACE, AUSTIN! Fort Worth bumps Austin to become fourth-largest city in Texas.

OCEANIA HAS NEVER BEEN AT WAR WITH J. EDGAR HOOVER: The New Yorker Reinvents J. Edgar Hoover To Attack Kash Patel.

The New Yorker worked overtime to reinvent the late J. Edgar Hoover — who led first the Bureau of Investigation and then the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for nearly 50 years — in order to pivot and attack President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to lead the Bureau: Kash Patel.

The outlet shared an article — headlined, “How would Kash Patel Compare to J. Edgar Hoover?” — via X with the following caption: “J. Edgar Hoover made the F.B.I. into a powerful but nonpartisan colossus. Kash Patel’s chief goal, by contrast, is to weaponize the Bureau to protect Donald Trump and wreak vengeance on his Administration’s enemies.”

The article concedes that Hoover was biased and used the FBI at times to accomplish his own purposes — but claims that Patel would be worse.

According to The New Yorker’s own past reporting, that means Patel would be worse than an FBI director who for years ran “a highly secret program under that name which not only spied on civil-rights leaders, suspected Communists, public critics of the F.B.I., student activists, and many others but also sought to intimidate, smear, and blackmail them, to break up marriages, get people fired, demoralize them.”

The coordinated effort to spy on Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. — and even an attempt to coerce him to commit suicide — all fell under the COINTELPRO banner.

Another article from just seven months ago labeled the notorious Hoover “Public Enemy No. 1,” and the X post promoting it read, “As F.B.I. director, J. Edgar Hoover promised to save American democracy from those who would subvert it—while his secret programs subverted it from within. Read about Hoover’s tenure at the Bureau, which began on this day in 1924.”

Hoover was so hated by the left that by the early 1970s, that Woody Allen was cheerfully dunking on him in Bananas:

In 2022, the establishment leftist Atlantic ran a piece headlined, “How J. Edgar Hoover Went From Hero To Villain” — and now back to being a hero just two years later, in order for the New Yorker to bash a current Republican. Eustace Tilly and the Tiny Mummies weep.

SHAPES OF THINGS BEFORE MY EYES, JUST TEACH ME TO DESPISE. WILL TIME MAKE MEN MORE WISE? Former Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson wants to run DNC.

Former Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson on Thursday said she’s launching a bid for chair of the Democratic National Committee, entering a crowded field calling for seismic change to the organization.

The self-help guru, who ran twice for president, said in a video she could bring expertise to the role.

She contended she understood “why we lost it,” that voters didn’t feel that Democratic candidates had their backs on key issues like health care and the economy and that many were depressed because of “bad public policy.”

“We need to transform, in a way, we need to reinvent the Democratic Party in order to counter what MAGA is bringing to the table,” Ms. Williamson said. “There’s a collective adrenaline rush in all of that, and we have to create our own massive psychological and emotional appeal for the American people.”

She does have a serious leg-up on other recent Democrat presidential candidates in accomplishing that goal:

THAT WAS THE YEAR THAT WAS: The Year Reheated.

We also stared in disappointment at the creations of Ms Caitlin Blunnie, whose modish but unremarkable illustrations are adorned with slogans of supposedly staggering profundity. Among the penetrating insights to be found were “Craft is resistance in a late-stage capitalist society,” “Smash the state and masturbate,” and, entirely without irony, “Abortion builds new futures.”

Further artistic rumblings were detected at Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum, where patrons were warned that, by liking landscape paintings, they risk moral corruption. Via new and scrupulously progressive signage, visitors were informed that the sight of a Constable landscape may trigger TERRIFYING BLOOD AND SOIL TENDENCIES. Or at least inspire thoughts of historical attachment, continuity, and belonging – thoughts deemed disconcerting, racist, and very much frowned upon, if only by the – wait for it – keepers of our heritage.

The thrills of public transport came to our attention in April – specifically, San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit system, where female commuters were issued with “bystander intervention cards” with which to repel the network’s growing number of junkies, muggers and public masturbators. The cards, we were assured, albeit unconvincingly, are “a concrete way to deal with an unsafe situation.” More obvious methods of restoring some semblance of civilisation – say, by arresting the aforementioned junkies, muggers and masturbators – were left seemingly unexplored.

We also marvelled at an attempt to problematise the much-loved comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, via the joyless prattle of Lukas Shayo. Mr Shayo, a graduate of CUNY and denizen of Brooklyn, attempted to establish his credentials by telling us how “violent” and “sexist” the strip is, and by complaining about the absence of smartphones, the inaccurate depiction of imaginary dinosaurs, and the strip’s protagonist spending “too much time by himself,” thereby allowing his imagination to entertain the reader. Those familiar with the strip may wonder whether complaining in print about Calvin’s mom being, well, a mom, and about the “sexism” of a cartoon six-year-old, should result in some reflection on one’s chosen career, and one’s life choices more generally.

And via the Reddit forum r/mypartneristrans, we pondered romantic complications of a very modern kind – namely, the woes of a woman who wants to pretend that she’s a gay man, but who was thwarted by her male partner now wanting to pretend he’s a woman, resulting in something not unlike straightness, albeit with extra steps. And so, we had a woman who expects to be taken seriously as a man, but who can’t bring herself to take seriously as a woman her own male partner. The woman in question struggled with her partner’s claims of sudden-onset transgenderism and fabulist pronouns, while expecting observance of her own. Which did rather cast some doubt on the broader enterprise.

The ghosts of the Weimar Republic are shaking the heads at 2024’s level of insanity and shouting that we really need to dial the craziness back a notch or twenty.

KWANZAA: A Fake Holiday With A Racist Goal, Created By A Criminal Madman.

Perhaps Kwanzaa is observed because this part of the Kwanzaa story is rarely mentioned by the mainstream media.

When he invented the holiday, Karenga said his goal was to “give Blacks an alternative to the existing holiday and give Blacks an opportunity to celebrate themselves and history, rather than simply imitate the practice of the dominant society.”

Why would an African American of Christian faith want to dissociate from their religion on Christmas or a Jew of color want to ignore the joy of a family lighting their Chanukiah (Menorah) sing-song and eating jelly donuts?

This holiday raised by some to the level of Christmas by wokeism has a purpose totally antithetical to Christmas. While Christmas is meant to unify, Kwanzaa is meant to divide and isolate Black Americans from the rest of the people who practice their same faith.

Related: College Republicans tweeted out wishes for a “happy Kwanza” and got absolutely destroyed for it.

In 2021, Kamala Harris Touted ‘Seven Principles’ of Marxist-Rooted Kwanzaa.

Vice President Kamala Harris celebrated the beginning of Kwanzaa Sunday night, an underlying Marxist holiday created by black nationalists, by praising one of the ‘seven principles’ of Kwanzaa, which happen to coincide with the seven principles of the Symbionese Liberation Army.

And she’s still at it! Pander-ific! Kamala Claims She Grew Up Celebrating Kwanzaa, There’s Just a Couple of Problems (Watch).

Kamala: "I grew up celebrating Kwanzaa"

Kwanzaa was invented in 1966 by Marxist professor Maulana Karenga to undermine Christmas, 2 years after Harris was born.

5 years later he was jailed for kidnapping, torturing innocent women in California.

Karenga also founded the United… pic.twitter.com/iLRzS1Njl6

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) December 26, 2024

I’m pretty sure Tom Wolfe didn’t write Radical Chic as a how-to guide.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why is the day after Christmas called Boxing Day?

WATCHING THE RAVENS BLOWING OUT THE TEXANS IN A SNOOZE FEST ON NETFLIX, MISTER WE COULD USE A MAN LIKE JOHN MADDEN AGAIN:

Or to put it another way:

The guy who was drunk sounded sober and the guy who was sober sounded drunk. And it was perfect. pic.twitter.com/1n0raeVL5Q

— Super 70s Sports (@Super70sSports) September 10, 2024

Beyoncé’s Weimar Christmas halftime show was something to behold: Beyoncé brings out Blue Ivy at halftime performance at the Houston Texans-Baltimore Ravens game amid Jay-Z’s rape lawsuit.

SOWELL CHRISTMAS:

He don't miss. pic.twitter.com/nntnym7GhD

— Thomas Sowell Quotes (@ThomasSowell) December 25, 2024

TROLL LEVEL: PJT: Trump floats NHL legend Wayne Gretzky as Canadian prime minister amid Trudeau turmoil.

If Gretzky doesn’t want the gig, I know somebody who does:

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why Jews Wrote Your Favorite Christmas Songs.

Much of the Jewish migration to the U.S. at the start of the 20th century came from the Pale of Settlement, the area ruled until the Russian Revolution by the Romanov dynasty. Jews were segregated into isolated towns known as shtetls where they were marginalized and often subjected to pogroms. Imagine, then, these people arriving at Ellis Island, where they were greeted by opportunity, diversity, and technology, finally free to express themselves in a new land.

They brought with them the Jewish musical tradition: the cantorial minor keys found in Jewish prayer. It’s no accident that Harold Arlen (born Chaim Arluck), the composer of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “Stormy Weather,” was the son of a cantor.

Then, there was the Yiddish language, a hybrid tongue with words plucked from German, Hebrew, and other languages. Yiddish lends itself to surprising rhymes and pleasant meter. In this respect Yiddish is a lot like American music itself—an alchemy of cultures that create a delightful and unexpected new combination.

So it’s this combination of factors—the Yiddish language, the freedom America afforded Jewish immigrants, and the haunting minor key found in Jewish prayer—that help explain why Jews wrote so many of the great American songs.

They gave us the American songbook. George and Ira Gershwin, the brothers who wrote “I Got Rhythm.” Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, who together wrote “The Sound of Music” and many other unforgettable Broadway shows. The great Jerome Kern, one of the first breakout stars of New York’s Tin Pan Alley, who composed the scores for “Show Boat” and “Swing Time,” two of the first major modern musicals.

But if there was one man who embodied the alchemy of the Jewish American experience in a single life, it was Irving Berlin, the greatest American composer of them all.

A decade ago, Mark Steyn described the horrible turn that Berlin’s life would take on the way to writing “White Christmas:”

Christmas was not kind to Irving Berlin. At 5 o’clock on the morning of Christmas Day 1928, his 31/2-week-old son, Irving Junior, was found dead in his bassinet. ‘I’m sure,’ his daughter Mary Ellin told me a few years back, ‘it was what we would now call “crib death”.’

Does that cast ‘White Christmas’ in a different light? The plangent melancholy the GIs heard in the tune, the unsettling chromatic phrase, the eerie harmonic darkening under the words ‘where children listen’; it’s not too fanciful to suggest the singer’s dreaming of children no longer around to listen. When the girls grew up and left home, Irving Berlin, symbol of the American Christmas, gave up celebrating it. ‘We both hated Christmas,’ Mrs Berlin said later. ‘We only did it for you children.’

To take a baby on Christmas morning mocks the very meaning of the day. And to take Irving Berlin’s seems an even crueller jest — to reward his uncanny ability to articulate the sentiments of his countrymen by depriving him of the possibility of sharing them.

Berlin was a professional Tin Pan Alleyman, but his story, his Christmas is there in the music. 23 years after his death, he embodies all the possibilities of America: his family arrived at Ellis Island as poor and foreign and disadvantaged as you can be, and yet he wove himself into the very fabric of the nation. His life and his art are part of the definition of America. Whatever his doubts about God, Berlin kept faith with his adopted land — and that faith is what millions heard 70 years ago in ‘White Christmas’.

But then, as Mark Judge wrote on Monday: From Superman to Bob Dylan: How Jews enriched our culture.

PEOPLE HAVE FUN WITH IDEA THAT ‘HUNNIKAH’ CELEBRATES A JEWISH GORILLA WAR:

pic.twitter.com/VUtKmlaSq4

— 𝚝𝚎𝚝𝚜𝚞𝚘 鉄男 (@morderwerken) December 25, 2024

RIP: Eagles Hall of Famer Bill Bergey dead at 79.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Is Christmas really a pagan festival?

The celebration of Christmas is suffused with probable pre-Christian elements, from the Yule Log to the Lord of Misrule (an official appointed to oversee the festivities) but this should hardly surprise us. After all, the priority of early missionaries was to ensure that people came to believe in the Christian God. Customs with no direct bearing on the basics of belief were often left alone; for example, it was several centuries before Anglo-Saxon missionaries to Germany began to interfere in pre-Christian funeral rites or betrothal customs. The medieval church did not, as some think, demand control of every aspect of people’s lives. However, whether surviving pre-Christian customs should be called pagan is debateable, since ‘paganism’ seems to imply something to do with the cult of pagan deities. It is pretty clear that such cults disappeared fairly quickly, within a few decades of the Christianisation of most European nations, even if many other traces of pre-Christian culture remained.

So, is Christmas pagan? In the sense that Christmas is a festival that retains, in most cultures, elements of pre-Christian midwinter festivities, the answer can be yes – provided we’re prepared to use the word ‘pagan’ in quite a loose way.

I blame Saturnalia:

ONE OF SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE’S FUNNIER 21st CENTURY SEGMENTS: 2005’s Christmastime For The Jews.  “Just watch it. And you don’t have to be Jewish. My WASP husband gets almost every joke.”

Related:

More: Differences Between Christmas And Hanukkah: The 2024 Snarky Edition.

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why is it overwhelmingly “Merry Christmas” in America, but “Happy Christmas” for many British people?