"War on Christmas" Subsides

An interesting article in Canada's National Post yesterday documents the reduced intensity of the this year's "War on Christmas" in the United States:

Because the furor was media-driven in the first place, media mentions seem as good a metric as any. After 2005, Google Trends shows a continuous decline in searches for and mentions of the "war on Christmas." Media mentions of a "war on Christmas" have fallen steadily as well, according to Nexis: There were 431 articles mentioning it as of Dec. 17, 2006; 187 by that time in 2007; 155 in 2008; and 97 in 2009. Even Fox News, the network that pushed the story in the winter of 2005, has essentially stopped talking about it: At this time in 2005, Fox had aired 80 episodes explicitly referring to the "war on Christmas"; in 2006, there were 24; in 2007, 11; in 2008, five; and three so far this year. The departure in 2008 of Fox News host John Gibson, who penned The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot To Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought, may have had something to do with it.

As a result, some groups dedicated to secularism and the separation of church and state — the anti-Christmas warriors — have gotten fewer invitations to debate the issue on radio and TV.