Dr. Karen Ishiguro is a professor of history and cultural studies at Michael Viscardi University in Neo San Diego, as well as a regular contributor to The New Yorker, Slate Magazine, and Amber Tamblyn’s Almanac, in the year 2121.  In the present day, her columns from the future appear solely at TheAtrox.com.

21/21 Hindsight
A look back from the century ahead

2. The War on Christmas

Yesterday I returned to my office to find my research assistant, Miguel, hunched over and deep in concentration, clutching intently, between his human hand and robot claw, a book.  The antique was entitled The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday is Worse Than You Thought, a 2005 curio by John Gibson, a conservative rabble-rouser of mild renown.  Miguel must have stumbled upon it somewhere in my modest personal library.

He was pawing the thing in grim confusion, perhaps wondering if there was an archaic disk-drive into which he ought to stick it.  “How do I … read it?”  I patiently reminded him of the operating strategy of “page-turning,” advice which prompted only a sigh and Miguel’s characteristic grimace of mild scorn.

“Maybe you should just tell me what it’s about,” he suggested.

I grinned, eager to discuss one of my favorite details of the early twenty-first century (the fascinating era in which you, dear reader, reside)!  I began to describe the average American’s obsession with becoming a better Christian and building a Godlier nation.

 “Becoming better Christians?” Miguel repeated, no doubt envisioning the handful of Believers he’d seen in person, during childhood field trips to the Theist Reservations.  “So they intended to … renounce all worldly possessions, violence, greed, and sexual indulgence?”

“Of course not, Miguel.  Don’t be silly.”  He rolled his eyes, which I chose to interpret as a request for elaboration.  “‘Being a better Christian,’ just meant purchasing the appropriate set of products.”

I rattled off a cursory series of examples: the Bible on CD-Rom; children’s animation in which the Old Testament is reenacted by vegetables; the entire Left Behind series; any Mel Gibson torture or revenge narrative; a car window decal depicting “Calvin” urinating on the Democratic party, a menorah, or the Theory of Evolution; a large, dead, evergreen tree; and (perhaps most important) greeting cards wishing a “Merry Christmas,” rather than the pagan “Happy Holidays.”

“Oh,” he nodded, wearily setting the tome aside.  “So the book’s just about consumer culture and religious unilateralism.”

“Yes, exactly,” I affirmed.

“I just … I hoped it was going to be about … you know … the War on Christmas.”

I laughed so long I thought the office’s oxygen reserves had burst.

Though his confusion is probably impossible to decode from your vantage point, Miguel had simply mixed-up your current cultural polarization (whose agitators proclaimed, “Christmas is under attack!”) with an international military action (in which many a general would proudly echo the identical slogan) a few years later: the Nuclear Yule Strike of 2010.  For a young man who makes his living doing historical research, my assistant is notoriously bad with dates.

I won’t bore you with all the lurid details (apparently so titillating to Miguel) of what was later dubbed the Atomic Winter Break.  After all, many of you will live to see it, if not live through it.  I’ll just provide an overview:

In the autumn of 2009, two celebrated Norwegian explorers, Bjorn Hamsun and Sigrid Stoltenberg, returned home from a triumphant polar expedition.  At the time, their journey seemed noteworthy for two reasons: they were the first team to cross the Arctic Ocean entirely by paddleboat, and the first couple to be married at the North Pole (in a small civil ceremony conducted by their dog, Thor, the couple’s constant travelling companion, who had been ordained as a justice of the peace the previous year).  Unfortunately, the trek is today remembered almost exclusively for the destruction spread by the three additional passengers who joined the trip home to Norway, a trio of adorable but feral elves gestating secretly in Bjorn, Sigrid, and Thor’s abdomens.

Though popular science had long regarded elves as mythical, it soon became clear that a colony of the Fair Folk had been simply lying dormant, frozen for several centuries in the arctic wastes.  But the particularly warm 2009 summer, and the subsequent melting of sections of polar cap, had freed the adorable parasites from their icy prison, and they quickly seized the opportunity to hitch a paddleboat ride to balmy Scandinavia.  Upon landfall, the wee carnivores rapidly reproduced, and within six months the human population of Hamsun and Stoltenberg’s quaint Hordaland village was dead, replaced by a diminutive, singing, fiercely homicidal elfin horde.

Over the horrible year to come, the insatiable appetites of the half-meter-tall monsters drove them south, east, and west, until only the most remote corners of the planet were left unravaged by the Dread Elf Pandemic.  Anti-elf vaccines proved unreliable, and eventually only a brutal, global strategy of quarantine and military retaliation drove the merry munchkins back to their polar stronghold.  The final blow was delivered in late December of 2010, when the endless arctic night was suddenly lit by the arrival of a dozen 20-megaton nuclear warheads, launched by missile from an international coalition fleet (whose number included a German submarine named, in an ironic twist of fate, the “Rudolph”).  The War on Christmas had come to its grim end.

But how I’ve rambled on!  That catastrophe, from your vantage point, is years down the road!  And there’s little sense in worrying when there’s so little you can do to prepare, save perhaps upping your folate consumption over the next half-decade, because folic acid can be extremely destructive to the elfin incubation process.  So, until next time then, I’ll leave you with an adage you’ll probably chant to your yet-unborn children many times: “A plate of peas a day keeps elf cocoons in your gastrointestinal tract away!”