Despite the EU’s Best Efforts, Christmas Is Not Canceled

T he problem with every socialist who dreams of being Mr. Scrooge is that socialists more often than not lack Dickens’s brilliance at storytelling. So, even though they aim high in their yearly attempt to cancel Christmas, because of their lack of talent they are usually about as successful as Bill Gates selling synthetic steaks. The last ones to try it are those who sit on the European Commission, that political elephants’ graveyard, now so far out on a political limb that it is difficult to distinguish when they are serious from when they are putting on some kind of joke à la The Babylon Bee. If EU founding father Konrad Adenauer were to rise from the dead, he would walk into the Berlaymont building in Brussels with a whip and do what Jesus did when the temple was overrun with merchants. Adenauer, who was an intelligent man, and perhaps foreseeing how the EU would end up, once lamented that “in view of the fact that God limited the intelligence of man, it seems unfair that He did not also limit his stupidity.”

The Maltese socialist Helena Dalli holds the honor of occupying the most useless position in the entire European Commission, which is saying something because the competition is very high. Her title is “Commissioner for Equality.” A few days ago, she circulated an internal document, “Guidelines on Inclusive Communication,” asking EU officials this year not to wish people “Merry Christmas” but “Happy holidays” so as not to offend non-Christians. Her document having been brought to light by the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, Dalli achieved a kind of immediate success: In less than two hours, the discriminatory expression “Merry Christmas” was a trending topic all over Europe. Mrs. Dalli soon found her mailbox overflowing with thousands of Christmas cards bearing the offensive and inclusiphobic message “Merry Christmas, Helena.” Brilliant.

Christians should heartily thank Dalli for this successful campaign that has achieved two major breakthroughs: reminding all of us Europeans that the bureaucrats are throwing our money away on a thing called the “Equality Commission,” and also reminding us that the right thing to do at this time of year is to say “Merry Christmas” if you don’t want to look as silly as the guidelines’ editors.

A few hours after its publication, Christmas was no longer canceled, and what was canceled was the Commissioner for Equality’s document. One naturally suspects that what really bothered the European Commission was not the content of the document but that it came to light at all. But there are still righteous in Sodom, and some well-meaning official decided to leak it to the press. Otherwise, the commission would not have had to backtrack in embarrassment.

Seeing the controversy unleashed, Dalli, who has revealed herself this week to be an excellent humorist, issued a statement announcing the withdrawal of the guidelines and apologizing in her own way: “The guidelines clearly need more work.” But in this statement she is also wrong. The guidelines need not more work but less. In fact, the guidelines did not need any work at any time, before, during, or after.

On the other hand, digging into the commissioner’s Twitter profile, I have been able to verify that the lady who does not want to risk offending non-Christians with Christmas salutations has not missed a single occasion in recent years to express her good wishes to Muslims on each and every major Islamic holiday, mentioning each one of them by name, in affectionate tweets. I really would hate to think that someone who serves as a commissioner of something as Christian as Europe has a problem with . . . Christians? But perhaps it was just rotten luck for her to have ended up in Brussels, when she could have brought equality to, say, the government of Afghanistan. Perhaps there her inclusive guidelines would have been received with a standing ovation by the Taliban, with three or four days of national holiday, Kalashnikovs firing in the air.

Even though it is only the Christmas part of the guidelines that has gained the spotlight, truth be told, every page is a real treasure, and it is a magnificent reminder of the prevailing insanity of our times. It recommends avoiding the term “immigrant citizen” because it excludes illegal aliens who have no citizenship; it furiously discourages the use of the term “old” because it might offend, I suppose, old people; it forbids saying “AIDS sufferer” because it seems to be a very non-inclusive way of saying that someone is sick with AIDS; and (hold on to your hat) it warns against the indiscriminate use of generic expressions like “John and Mary” to refer to a random European couple, because they are Western names that could be “offensive.”

“Avoid considering anyone a Christian,” the document concludes, because we must “be sensitive to the fact that people have different religious traditions.” And it is right. I myself, besides being a Christian, belong to the Church Against Stupidity, a minority creed that brings together all of us who are fed up with the EU being a nest of crazed social democrats, communists in disguise, and second-generation woke bureaucrats bent on indoctrinating and diluting the traditions of Old Europe from which they otherwise get paid punctually at the end of the month.

So I demand that Dalli be sensitive to me as well. My brethren and I, in the Church Against Stupidity, find the mere existence of an “Equality Commission” in the EU terribly discriminatory, we find it blasphemous that someone would write such a load of nonsense in “inclusive” guidelines paid for with our tax money, and above all, we find the fact that this woman is called “Helena Dalli” an unacceptable offense to all people who are called Helena, or whose last name is Dalli, and who are serious, hardworking, and competent, with a healthy level of cerebral functioning.

By the way, I almost forgot: Merry Christmas, Helena Dalli!