As culture war watcher Beth mentioned last week, public observance of Christmas in Basra, Iraq, was canceled after two local Christians were killed because of their religion. That is a war.

Earlier this month Americans United for Separation of Church and State threatened to sue the city of Dallas, Ga., if they didn't remove a nativity scene from public property. That is a legal dispute about the proper use of public property.

This distinction seems lost on the good people at CBN (among many others). According to their story about Dallas, Christmas is "under attack" and "under siege" and "simply part of a larger war being waged on anything and everything Christian."

All I want for Christmas is the cessation of these toxic war metaphors. How about this: if people aren't dying, don't call it a war. The purpose of war metaphors is to cultivate a sense of fear, outrage and victimhood, and if fear, outrage and victimhood have to be cultivated with absurdly exagerrative rhetoric, those sensibilities are unwarranted.