It seems to start earlier every year, doesn't it? I mean, we haven't even celebrated Thanksgiving yet, and the War-on-Christmas rhetorical drumbeat has already started.I sometimes wonder whether the whole War-on-Christmas thing is a game to see who can advance the most ludicrous argument with a straight face. If I'm right, then I think the 2008 holiday season may already have a winner. In the Nov. 20 installment of his aptly named "Wonder Land" column, Wall Street Journal editor Daniel Henninger boldly goes where no Culture Warrior has gone before.

This year we celebrate the desacralized "holidays" amid what is for many unprecedented economic ruin -- fortunes halved, jobs lost, homes foreclosed. People wonder, What happened? One man's theory: A nation whose people can't say "Merry Christmas" is a nation capable of ruining its own economy.

Think the economic crisis is the result of a complicated chain of causes and effects? Nonsense. As we all know, saying "Happy Holidays" at this time of year is more than just a misguided effort to acknowledge the existence of (a) multiple Christian holidays and (b) multiple non-Christian holidays that occur over the course of several days. It is also an assault on religion itself, or at least on the only religion that matters. And without (Christian) religion you have no morality, and without morality you have unchecked greed. So, as Henninger's editorial argues, failing to say "Merry Christmas" with abandon as you go about your business in the secular world can only result in total economic collapse. I hope you'll keep this in mind as you try to stretch your budget to allow some holiday cheer this year: all of this could have been avoided, if only "Northerners and atheists" -- and you know who you are -- hadn't permitted this country to slide into "Christmas"-less amorality.Read for yourself, but I think we have a winner. Please: no others need apply.