Cruel Yule

They hate Christianity. So of course they hate Christmas.

By Bruce Bawer

The perennial yuletide favorite “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” was introduced in the 1944 MGM film Meet Me in St. Louis. It’s a bittersweet song, sung by Esther Smith (Judy Garland) to her little sister Tootie (Margaret O’Brien) at a point in the story when they think that their family is about to move to New York from their beloved home in the Gateway City. The melody was by Ralph Blane; the lyric, by Hugh Martin, began: “Have yourself a merry little Christmas, / Let your heart be light. / Next year all our troubles will be out of sight.”

But those weren’t the original words. When the songwriters first submitted their ditty to the folks at MGM, the opening lines read: “Have yourself a merry little Christmas, / It may be your last. / Next year we may all be living in the past.” But Judy Garland and Vincente Minnelli, her director and future husband, found them far too downbeat for this sweet family drama. So Martin changed them.

“Have yourself a merry little Christmas, / It may be your last.” Many of us in the West, surveying the landscape around us, have been intensely aware for years now of the changes that our own little corner of the world has undergone. In some places, to be sure, the changes are more dramatic than others. In Western Europe, many cities are barely recognizable; certain once-pleasant neighborhoods now considered no-go zones, while in other neighborhoods the Muslim call to prayer can be heard several times a day from the minaret of the nearest mosque.

The U.S. is not as far gone, but it’s on the way. Minneapolis, once a remarkably clean, quiet, and safe metropolis, its culture shaped by hardworking, law-abiding Scandinavians, is now a stronghold of corrupt, criminal Somalis. Meanwhile, Muslims in Plano, Texas, of all places, are building their own Emerald City a few miles to the east.

If the place you’re living in hasn’t gotten there yet, it will soon.

Some of us, as noted, are keenly aware of all this. Yet not a few of the people around us seem to be blind to these changes – or are scared to admit to noticing them.

Still others see a difference only when the Christmas season comes around. In many Western European countries, for example, while Muslim holidays are publicly commemorated with ever-increasing visibility, celebrations of Christmas are scaled back year after year. Indeed, it’s because official Christmas events in London have been more and more muted in recent years that Tommy Robinson (whom the British elites hate because he blew the whistle on Muslim rape gangs) held a public carol service on December 13. Huge crowds showed up. It was apparently enjoyed by all. But the legacy media, which have been brainwashed into condemning anything that might offend a Muslim, labeled it “controversial.”

Still, Tommy saved London – or saved Christmas in London, anyway. Paris has had no such luck. In that city, perhaps the most popular annual event of the Christmas season is the New Year’s Eve concert on the Champs-Élysées. It’s been going on for six decades; last year it drew a million people. But it won’t happen this time around. Why? Because Muslim mayhem in Paris has made large outdoor gatherings of this sort increasingly dangerous.

For one thing, the Champs-Élysées, as the New York Post reported on December 13, has been transformed from a rue des rêves into a road to perdition, with throngs of young Muslim migrants streaming in every night from the suburbs to loot high-end boutiques and brawl with pedestrians and police; for another, New Year’s Eve in the City of Light has for years been a less and less pleasant experience, with nearly a thousand cars being set on fire on December 31, 2024.

Way back on October 16 came the news that Germany’s counterpart to the New Year’s Eve concert on the Champs-Élysées is also saying auf Wiedersehen. This year, the midnight celebration – which is usually broadcast from the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, a setting that is symbolic of Western freedom – is retreating to a less resonant location in Hamburg. In this case, Berlin’s mayor, Kai Wegner, blamed a tight budget, even though the city spends handsome amounts every year on Islamic cultural events such as “Muslim Culture Week.”

In many municipalities around the West, this seems to be becoming the rule: millions for Muslim social functions, nothing for Christianity.

In many a European city, one of the favorite destinations for holiday shoppers is the local open-air Christmas market. Alas, precisely because they’re popular with shoppers, these markets are also choice targets for terrorists. The litany of jihadist attacks on these markets in recent years is sobering. Just two examples out of many: on December 19, 2016, a truck was driven into the Christmas market at the foot of the famous Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin, killing twelve people and injuring 56; on December 20, 2024, an SUV plowed into a crowd at the Christmas market in Magdeburg, killing six people and injuring 338.

This year, security has been amped up at a number of the markets – with good reason. On December 12, five men – including an imam – were arrested before they were able to carry out a planned vehicular attack on a Christmas market in Bavaria. Four days later, the Daily Mail reported that a planned “major terrorist attack” on a Christmas market in an unnamed Polish city had been foiled. Poland? Hasn’t the Polish government supposedly done a magnificent job of keeping Muslims out of the country? Yes, it has. But the plotter in this case was a Lublin university student, identified as Mateusz W., who was “very fascinated by Islam” and who “wanted to commit an attack” in support of ISIS.

To be sure, at least the Christmas markets are still in business. But how long will that last?

As Daniel Greenfield reported here the other day, officials in Sydney have, in the wake of the Bondi Beach massacre, stifled the Christmas season in a range of ways: they’ve cancelled a New Year’s festival that was scheduled to take place at Bondi Beach, scaled back other Christmas observances, replaced colored Christmas lights at key Sydney locations with faith-neutral white lights, and quashed a traditional “Carols in the City” program. These acts of civic cowardice were spun by authorities as motivated by compassion for Jews; but as Greenfield noted, “[n]o one in the Jewish community” asked for any of this. In fact, these actions are gestures of appeasement toward the Muslim community, and they all send the same message: terrorism works.

But so it goes when you’re governed by globalists. For them, canceling a cultural event – even a beloved one with decades of tradition behind it – is far more desirable than arresting and deporting the people who threaten to blow it up. Yes, it’s fine to have all the sympathy in the world for the poor and downtrodden who want to live in your country. But if you let them pour in unvetted and on a massive scale, you’re putting their welfare ahead of that of your own citizens, and placing the latter at the mercy of newcomers from low-trust, high-corruption, high-violence societies – and, most unsettlingly, at the mercy of Muslims whose ultimate goal is political, social, and cultural dominance.

The situation is pretty straightforward. But the current leaders of countries like Britain, France, Ireland, and Australia don’t get it. Or don’t want to. They’re globalists. They think they’re broadminded, sophisticated, virtuous. Instead of accepting that their job is to do what’s best for their own citizens, they’ve decided that their job is to prioritize the welfare of foreigners whom they perceive as destitute – even if the foreigners in question are Muslim felons who despise freedom – and to serve these miscreants’ needs in the name of their citizens.

Of course, the problem with this wonderfully generous approach is that when you’re a leader who keeps closing down popular events that are building blocks of your society, what you’re doing is closing down Western civilization, one step at a time. No single step, admittedly, feels that important at the moment. So what if an annual concert on the Champs-Élysées becomes a mere memory? So what if public carol services become something parents in the future will have to tell their children about, because they’ve vanished into the mists of history? Perhaps such cultural rituals, taken one by one, can seem less than vitally important. But they’re all building blocks. And take away enough of those building blocks and the whole edifice will inevitably collapse.

And it’ll all have happened because your country’s leaders would rather be considered enlightened by the fools and cowards of today than be esteemed by their wise and brave contemporaries and thanked by posterity. They’d rather cower in their comfort zone than stand up to an obvious existential danger. They’d rather be immobilized by the fear of being called a racist – as if that slur meant anything anymore! – than contemplate the genuine fearfulness of a future life under Islam.

So enjoy your Christmas, however pared-down it may be this year. It may be your last.

First published in Front Page Magazine