Call us old-fashioned. But here at CDN we simply want to wish you a very Merry Christmas. We will be taking the next two weeks off from our newsletter (Dec. 25 and Jan. 1) to focus on family and friends. Unlike the alarmists with their incessant efforts to steal Christmas. Back in 2000 we were told “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is” because of “warmer winters”. A decade later David Suzuki tried to traumatize kids with a fake-news “live” report from a rainy North Pole where Santa’s workshop was going under due to the Arctic melting. Then in Dec. 2017 something called “Policy Horizons Canada” actually announced on a Canadian government website that Santa was moving to the South Pole “Thanks to rising global temperatures, rapidly melting Arctic ice and growing human operations in the North”. Now NBC warns of starving reindeer, a British primary school bans Christmas cards because “The manufacture of Christmas cards is contributing to our ever-growing carbon emissions” and the Paris Aquarium has Santa scuba diving to teach kids about… what else?... climate change. What humbug.

Alarmists’ determination to frighten children and demonize modern life is starting to take a real and shocking toll on kids’ mental health. And if they have their way they will suck the joy out of every other corner of family life in the name of their cause. For instance some Australian “lecturer in critical thinking” urges you to win climate debates over Christmas dinner by being a shrill monomaniacal zealot like Greta Thunberg.

Forget about avoiding political debates at a family gathering in favour of peace on Earth and good will toward all, now’s the time to learn how to serve up climate propaganda with the turkey and gravy. As if there’s anyone you’d less like to have glaring at you over the turkey than Ms. Thunberg. Who in fact would also be glaring at the turkey as she’s as aggressively vegan as she is aggressively everything except festive.

At least the New York Times’ “Climate Fwd.”, which we often mock for its microsolutions to what it claims is a macrocrisis, offers the cheery advice to switch to LED Christmas lights and consider turning them off by 3:00 a.m. LED lights really do have an eldritch feel that improves the Christmas ambiance.

In the interest of brief seasonal amity, can we ask the alarmists that if you’re going to be wrong you at least leave childhood icons out of it? Tell us tall tales about polar bears if you will. For instance that instead of going extinct they are invading Russian villages but of course it just proves to the BBC that the bears are in trouble because of vanishing ice. (This story is from Ryrkaypiy in the Chukotka region which… wait for it… is warming faster than average.) But these bears are eating walrus not reindeer. Or Belugas; the BBC also says polar bears hunting them from shore in western Hudson Bay is proof of climate catastrophe even though it’s old news and the ice is thick.

Perhaps believing in the innocence of childhood marks us as naifs. Perhaps the goal today is to have every kid plunged into despair and snarling from a podium. But for ourselves, we ask people to leave Santa Claus out of their polemics and, at least for a week or so, leave polemics out of their lives.