In the right-wing imaginary, the War on Christmas had a good run. Fox News host John Gibson alleged in a 2005 book that liberals were planning to “ban the sacred holiday,” and a moral panic was born, yielding outrage after outrage almost every year. This year, however, the defenders of all things merry and bright have been pretty quiet, and polling shows that even among conservatives and Donald Trump supporters, a declining minority of Americans believe that the beloved holiday is under siege. Sensitive neighbors (and corporations hoping to avoid their ire) may continue to wish us a “Happy Holidays,” the ACLU may continue to object to religious iconography in the town square, yet Americans are ignoring the likes of Tucker Carlson and Bill O’Reilly, instead adulting with a “live and let live” attitude.

This rare moment of cultural chill allows us to come together as Americans to confront the real war on Christmas, the one you won’t hear about on Fox News: a class war.

If you’ve read Charles Dickens’s 1843 classic A Christmas Carol, you’ll remember that the main character is one of literature’s nastiest bosses. Ebenezer Scrooge hates the holiday and resents giving his employee, Bob Cratchit, even one paid day off with his family, calling Christmas “a poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket” and demanding that the terrified Cratchit be at his desk “all the earlier” the next day.

As bad as that sounds, poor Bob Cratchit had it easier than many American workers today. A recent survey of over one thousand workers found that one in ten were working on Christmas Day. Nearly one in four expected to be working on Christmas Eve, while more expected to work on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day. Reasons included needing the money and lacking paid time off.

Dickens, like his contemporary, Karl Marx, made observations about capitalism and its abuses to the human spirit that remain all too relevant today; in this case, his point was that bosses don’t stop acting like bosses at the holidays. Today, layoffs at this time of year are common. Last week, billionaire Elon Musk, who has been elected to exactly no government office but suddenly seems to be running everything, was apparently seeking to outdo Scrooge by trying to force a government shutdown, which would have meant that active-duty soldiers and other government workers wouldn’t get their paychecks.

For some workers, conditions on the job get even worse at Christmastime. One of the reasons Americans give for working during the holiday is the fact that it is an especially busy time of year for their company or industry. Retail is one brutal example. If you’re shopping online for Christmas presents, and using Amazon to do so, you’ve probably noticed how fast your packages arrive: that’s convenient for the procrastinating holiday shopper, but there is a human toll to that efficiency. Amazon workers say the holiday season is particularly stressful, given the intense pressure they’re under to make so many more time-sensitive deliveries than usual.

As Teamsters went on strike at seven Amazon warehouses — in New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta, and Southern California — some workers have observed that they were barely seeing their loved ones this season, considered “peak” for the company. “When you think of the holidays you think of spending time with your family, you think of reconnecting,” a packer in Staten Island told Labor Notes, “And during peak, all you can think of is sleep.”

Even for those who don’t have to slave away in an Amazon warehouse, exploitation gets in the way of Christmas. Many people don’t get paid enough to enjoy travel and gift-giving. In fact, financial stress during the holiday season is so common that articles advising us how to manage it are published every year.

In A Christmas Carol, the problem of the callous capitalist is resolved spiritually; Scrooge is visited by a series of ghosts who make him understand the poverty of his greedy ways. The ghosts awaken in Scrooge a compassion for Cratchit and his struggling family, showing him the sour misery of his own life as a capitalist and all the love and fellowship he has missed in a life devoted to accumulation. Scrooge sees the error of his ways and becomes a better man: a generous boss, a kindly second father to Cratchit’s disabled son, and a philanthropic pillar of the community. And he ends his personal war on Christmas, becoming an enthusiastic celebrant.

It’s an enchanting story, literally; Dickens was smart enough about class relations under capitalism to know that Scrooge’s transformation wouldn’t have been realistic without an extraordinary plot twist. Scrooge needs an intervention — by ghosts. Dickens knew that getting capitalists to behave humanely, at Christmas or at any time of year, would require a departure from the realism he employs in many of his other novels.

Unfortunately, we can’t count on spirits to fix present-day Scrooges like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. There’s only one other option: waging class war from below, as the Amazon workers are doing. Merry Christmas to all who celebrate, and a happy class war to all!

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