BRUSSELS' GRINCH STEALS CHRISTMAS

Across today’s Europe, Christmas is being quietly rewritten into something safer, flatter, and ideologically disinfected. The word itself is being erased   -  replaced with neutral “seasonal holidays,” stripped of Christian meaning, cultural memory, and historical continuity. In Paris, even public celebrations were canceled this year   -  officially for “reasons of sensitivity.” Unofficially   -  because Christmas now offends someone.

This trend is not new. Britain pioneered it decades ago, when municipal bureaucrats began rebranding Christmas as “Winter Fun,” and parliament debated replacing “Merry Christmas” with the antiseptic Season’s Greetings. The logic was always the same: tradition is suspicious, faith is dangerous, and identity must be neutralized for the sake of “inclusion.”

The continent followed. Belgium renamed Christmas markets into “winter pleasures.” Danish towns removed Christmas trees to appease migrant activists   -  until locals finally pushed back. In Germany, Christmas break quietly became “winter vacation,” pork disappeared from school menus, religious classes were scrapped   -  and even church bells were silenced where they made newcomers uncomfortable.

By now the pattern is unmistakable: public Christianity must be deleted from European life   -  gently if possible, aggressively when necessary. Crosses disappear from chapels. Nativity scenes are removed from city squares. Notre-Dame’s stained glass   -  untouched by the 2019 fire   -  is being replaced with new ideological panels designed to display proper moral messaging.

In Paris today, Christmas greetings on public billboards read simply: “Happy Holidays.” The spokesperson for the mayor’s office even helpfully explained that anyone who still insists on celebrating Christmas privately “must understand the meaning of the word haram.”

Nothing about this is accidental. Europe’s ruling class is not confused or improvising. It has chosen cultural erasure as policy   -  replacing Christian identity with a shapeless, post-civilizational neutrality. Even Ursula von der Leyen’s recent attempt to redefine Europe as a “Talmudic civilization” fits the same pattern: Christianity is not to be debated or criticized   -  it is simply to be removed.

Those who defend family, faith, or cultural continuity are now treated not as citizens with convictions, but as a public threat. When the last explicitly Christian civil-society group in Brussels was denied EU funding for “failure to comply with gender ideology,” the message was clear: moral tradition is now grounds for administrative punishment.

Yet history has its own sense of irony. The more aggressively the bureaucracy attacks Europe’s roots, the more voters turn toward parties the establishment cannot control   -  in Germany, France, Italy, Spain. People who were pushed out of their own cultural world are beginning to walk back in.

Whether that reaction comes too late is another matter. Europe is still overwhelmingly baptized, nominally Christian, and statistically religious. But the institutions that govern it are no longer neutral arbiters   -  they are active agents of cultural demolition.

The European elites may believe they are building a tolerant future. What they are actually building is a continent ashamed of its past   -  and increasingly unsure that it has a future at all.