Claim: The ACLU is trying to outlaw Christianity.
Fact: The ACLU has a long record of defending Christians in civil liberties cases around the country. Here are two great examples. At one Michigan High School in 2001, the valedictorian of the graduating class included a passage from the Bible in her yearbook entry. The school deleted it. The ACLU successfully intervened on behalf of the student, arguing that they were interfering with her right to free religious expression. [Link]

More to the point, at another high school in Massachusetts, a group of students were disciplined for giving out candy canes with Christian messages at Christmas time. Again, the ACLU intervened on the students' behalf, arguing once again that the since the candy canes were not given out during class periods, the school was interfering with their right to free religious expression.[Link]

If anything, it seems that the ACLU has been on the Fox News side of the 'War on Christmas.'

Claim: 'Happy Holidays' is meant to exclude Christmas and secularize the holiday.
Fact: This one has been bandied about quite a bit -- that 'Happy Holidays' should be offensive to Christians because it replaces 'Merry Christmas.' It's quite absurd. It's pretty obvious that the word 'holiday' is derived from 'holy day,' which is anything but secular. Rather than being anti-Christian by any stretch, phrases like 'Happy Holidays' and 'Season's Greetings' have been used for years in reference to the cluster of holidays from Thanksgiving to New Years, including Christmas.

Not long ago, I had a brief exchange of e-mails with 'War on the War on Christmas' crusader Burt Prelutsky. I closed my correspondence with a cheery 'Merry Christmas!' But Burt is Jewish. So in a PS, I wrote, "[i]sn't it silly how I wrote 'Merry Christmas' in closing a letter to someone who doesn't celebrate the holiday? See, that's one of the reasons people say 'Happy Holidays' instead.... It's just good sense." Burt's response to this was that, " 'Happy holidays' is fine for someone like me, but to say it for PC reasons to Christians only means that the secular left has another scalp on its silly belt."

Now, my problem with this stems from the fact that I grew up in a town with a huge Jewish population. Though I was a member of the local Catholic church, many of my Jewish friends assumed I was Jewish, too. So right around winter vacation (so-called because you get more than just Christmas off), quite a few people wished me a Happy Hanukkah. I never found it offensive, but I did think it was funny that people just assumed they knew what my religion was. And that's the problem with Burt's tortured logic. I don't say 'Happy Holidays' to people who I know are Christian -- that would be kind of silly. But I don't pretend to know what anyone's religion is just by looking at them. So 'Happy Holidays' it is.

Claim: Retail stores like Target are anti-Christian because they don't use the word Christmas in their holiday season promotions and advertising.
Fact: A recent op-ed in the Washington Post (I'd probably leave out the fact that you got this from the so-called liberal media) found that there were over 39,000 uses of the word 'Christmas' at Target's website. Perhaps stores that have replaced 'Christmas'
 with 'Holidays' in their signs and circulars are not anti-Christian so much as they're trying to promote their products to the widest possible audience. It's not as if they've changed the names of any of the Christmas items they sell to whitewash Christianity. [Link]

And this doesn't even begin to get into the debate about America being a Christian nation, even though the Christian Puritans banned Christmas as a pagan holiday, many of our Founding Fathers were deists who didn't necessarily believe in the divinity of Christ, and Christmas was not recognized as a federal holiday until 1870. So use this as an open thread. Any important 'Claims vs. Facts' that I left out? What's your strategy for fighting the 'War on the War on the War on Christmas'?