It’s December, which means it’s the time of year when we switch over from the “I can’t believe it’s only the middle of November and they’re already putting out Christmas decorations in the shops” complainers to the “War on Christmas” complainers. They cannot, after all, complain about ubiquitous Christmas decorations when we’re actually within a few frantic weeks of the big day, but they are professional victims who subsist on a diet of manufactured outrage, so they have to come up with something.

Redmond’s local paper, The Reporter, signalled its own volley with an article - unsourced and undoubtedly apocryphal, inasmuch as you hear about twelve examples of this every year - irate that the Post Office would be prohibited from displaying Christmas decorations, the implicit culprit being PC thugs who preach tolerance but secretly hate Christianity and all its trappings. Oh, and who don’t exist. The Reporter and its eagerly invective editorial staff comprise one of the sadder examples of the low-stakes partisan press, distracted by their own sense of discomfort and utterly oblivious to how good they’ve got it, needing to craft offenses against which to rail out of whole cloth.

Because, of course, the Post Office is displaying Christmas decorations, is now and has been forever - even ignoring the Toys for Tots donation box endemic to every Post Office this time of year, the Christmas and Hannukah and Kwanzaa stamps and merchandise for sale, the holiday-themed packaging, boxes and postcards, stuffed animals with Santa hats, holding plush presents, there’s nonetheless red bows hanging off the bleak brick walls and backlit by the sickly yellow light coming in from the sorting bay and diffused through filthy Post Office windows.

I, for one, wouldn’t mind if the Post Office didn’t put up Christmas decorations. I have nothing against Christmas, per se, and I’m not so miserly with my tax dollars that I would begrudge a federal employee the hour or two on the clock they’d need to hang the occasional stocking or string Christmas lights. I wouldn’t mind if the Post Office didn’t decorate for Christmas because I don’t plan to be celebrating Christmas at the Post Office.

I don’t understand folks who NEED every institution around them to observe the holidays, and more than that I don’t understand why they complain if one or two don’t; it’s not like the parks, the libraries, the malls, the grocery stores, the parking garages, the auto dealerships, the boutiques and copy shops and sandwich stalls and every other storefront and street aren’t already festooned with tinsel up the wahzoo, do they really die a little inside if the state capitol isn’t ringed with poinsettas and jingle bells?

I mostly don’t understand them because they are the same people who spent all of October and November complaining about the store decorations and merchandise going on sale too early. Two months complaining that there’s too much Christmas to be seen, a month spent complaining that there’s not enough...