But a right-wing myth generally lives on forever, no many how many times it is debunked. You are powerless to prevent its spread. All you can do is perhaps convince one person that one talk radio meme is completely bogus. But you will probably have better luck simply changing the subject. (Suggestions: Whether or not Peyton Manning will be a Colt next season, “American Horror Story,” Jay-Z and Beyonce’s baby.)

If you insist on answering back, here are some suggestions.

Barack Obama’s illegal immigrant aunt is an illegal immigrant and so is his illegal immigrant uncle, and they must be deported.

First, the immigration status of Barack Obama’s aunt Zeituni Onyango (the half-sister of Obama’s father, from whom the president was estranged for much of his life) was leaked to the press just before the 2008 election. She eventually won asylum, because she is old and sick and Kenya has recently seen a rise in political violence. “Uncle Omar” is in the news because he was recently arrested for drunk driving, and it turns out he’s lived here since 1963 and been in violation of a deportation order since the early 1990s. Mitt Romney accidentally said he’d deport him, but then Romney sort of walked that back, because he’s Romney.

Just ask what exactly is moral or beneficial to American interests in sending an old woman who is related to the United States president to a nation where she could be a target of politically motivated violence. And whether or not an appropriate punishment for drunk driving is to be sent “back” to a foreign country that you haven’t lived in in half a century. Then add that these cases have nothing to do with the president beyond involving people he is distantly related to, because the White House has never sought special treatment for either of these people. Then ask your relative if they really want these two people to go have to live under SHARIAH LAW, because why not.

That probably won’t convince anyone so maybe now would be a good time to bring up your own family’s ethnic heritage, unless you all happen to be American Indians.

Food nazi Michelle Obama is forcing children to eat vegetables even though she herself is fat and enjoys hamburgers.

“Have you ever noticed that pretty much everyone with a creepy fixation on the first lady’s fitness is a fat old white guy?”

Excessive regulation/regulatory uncertainly is killing the recovery, that is why there are no jobs!

Look, you can print out some lame chart from Ezra Klein or memorize some “statistics” about Obama not issuing any more regulations than other presidents, but those won’t help, because numbers and charts lie about everything. This is basically just a stand-in for the entire incomprehensible right-wing narrative of the ongoing miserable economy. Your best bet is just to say that it’s criminal that no Wall Street executives went to jail for fraud (unless your familiarly includes lots of Wall Street executives, in which case my only advice is to steal the silver on your way out).

Barack Obama disrespected the U.K. by sending it the White House bust of Winston Churchill.

Sure, the “correct” answer is that presidents change the decor when they move into the White House, but I’d just say, “Winston Churchill was a raging racist drunk asshole,” because he was.

Barack Obama’s Christmas card is anti-Christmas.

Sarah Palin insinuated that the Obamas’ Christmas card — which features wrapped presents, poinsettias, garland and bows — is part of his secret Muslim plot to destroy Christmas, because the card featured Bo the dog rather than “family, faith and freedom.” I’m not sure what you say to this, actually, because at this point you’re dealing with a lunatic, but if there are Christmas cards from loved ones nearby, maybe go check and see how many of them explicitly feature “family, faith and freedom.”

Solyndra!

Solyndra was a solar company that got a loan guarantee from the government and then it went bankrupt. Conservatives say this means the government shouldn’t try to support things that it thinks are good ideas because the government is a lot worse at “picking winners and losers” than the private sector, which never loans money to companies that then go bankrupt. I dunno, the “scandal” here is pretty opaque. I’d recommend trying to get someone to explain, to you, what exactly happened that was so illegal or whatever. Basically, the review of this loan guarantee to this poorly managed solar company with political connections was rushed, and someone might have asked them not to lay everyone off until after the midterms, which is pretty stupid, but honestly much less stupid than spending $4 billion on subsidies for oil and gas.

Eric Holder must resign because of “Fast and Furious.”

“Fast and Furious” was such an epically stupid and awful idea that you shouldn’t bother trying to “defend” it (though if you care you could point out that there’s still no evidence that Eric Holder knew about it) — you should instead congratulate your relative on finally coming to his senses regarding the ridiculous counterproductive drug war. We can finally all agree that the government should find better things to do with our tax dollars!

The New Black Panther Party.

Tell your relatives that you have recently joined the New Black Panther Party. They will be too terrified to bring it up again!

But there is also something different going on this year. A popular hashtag on Twitter is #OccupyXmas. In Portland, San Francisco and elsewhere, carolers dressed in Santa suits and elf outfits have been singing a new song. It goes in part like this:

Arrest ye merry bankermen

All profiting today

You crashed the whole economy

Yet nothing did you pay …

Through the centuries a spirit of rebellion has often colored the Christmas season. There is good historical precedent for thinking of Santa Claus and Christmas itself as icons of the 99 percent movement.

Next to nothing is known about Saint Nicholas, a Greek who was the Christian bishop of Demre, a town on the southern coast of Turkey. As Christianity expanded northward he became a palimpsest — a symbol that could be invoked for any variety of causes, such as the welfare of children. According to one persistent legend he was a member of the affluent 1 percent who became disturbed by prevailing social inequities and sought to redistribute wealth to the less fortunate. Through the centuries the notion of wealth redistribution would be associated with the saint, and with Christmas.

The Catholic calendar assigned feast days for celebrating its saints, and Nicholas’ day was Dec. 6 — the same month in which the church had placed Christmas. While the actual date of the nativity (which was not celebrated until centuries after Christ’s lifetime) was unknown, assigning it to the winter season enabled the church to co-opt ancient midwinter festivals. Because of their shared season of observance, St. Nicholas and Christmas became associated with each other.

In the pre-modern era, once the fall harvest and slaughter season had been completed agricultural workers found themselves with time on their hands and a bountiful supply of fermented beverages. Rowdy celebrations were one result. An antiauthoritarian strain ran through these winter rituals. The Christmas season was a time of  what the early-20th-century literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin described as the spirit of carnival. A master of revels, called the Lord of Misrule, might be appointed or selected by chance (for example, by discovering a bean hidden in a cake) to govern over festivities in which the high and low exchanged places. At this time the wealthy were expected to provide food and drink for common folk. The ritualized disorder provided a kind of annual safety valve against smoldering class resentments and grievances.

By the early seventeenth century, when urbanization, technological advance, and new cross-cultural connections were transforming the old social order, the safety valve stopped working. The king of England, James I, was concerned that such developments as sprawling urbanization and the disturbing outspokenness of women were eroding traditional values. He commissioned his chief propagandist, the playwright and poet Ben Jonson, to create a performance called “Christmas, His Masque,” to be presented around Christmas Day, 1616. This play would mark the first literary appearance of the prototype of Santa Claus, called Father Christmas. Jonson described him as “attir’d in round Hose, long Stockings, a close Doublet, a high crownd Hat with a Broach, a long thin beard, a Truncheon, little Ruffes, white Shoes, his Scarffes, and Garters tyed crosse, and his Drum beaten before him.” Accompanied by his 10 children (Mis-rule, Carroll, Minc’d-Pie, Gamboll, Post and Paire, New-Yeares-Gift, Mumming, Wassail, Offering, and Babie-Cocke) he appealed for a return to “a right Christmas, as of old it was.”

“Christmas, His Masque” was intended to encourage people to resist the enticements and corruptions of modernity and return to traditional values in the hope of restoring the more stable social order of earlier times. At the same time, it sought to check the growing influence of religious hard-liners such as the Puritans, who opposed the celebration of Christmas. In this it failed—within a generation the monarchy would be overthrown, to be replaced by the religious extremists.

The Puritans, who rejected ceremony in favor of direct communion with God, were opposed to all of the old seasonal celebrations. They also objected to the license and disorder of the winter festivals. Among the practices they took exception to during the Christmas season festivities was cross-dressing, a vestige of ancient winter saturnalias. Role reversals were a common feature of the winter celebrations: the fool would be king for the day, peasants would temporarily command the wealthy, men and women would exchange roles. According to a minister writing in the early 1700s, Christmas mumming often involved “a changing of Clothes between Men and Women; who when dressed in each other’s habits, go from one Neighbor’s house to another … and make merry with them in disguise.” The merry making involved the objectionable habit of caroling, which, the minister said, occurred “in the midst of Rioting, Chambering [fornication], and Wantonness.”

The Puritans brought their opposition to Christmas to the new world. Suppression of Christmas began in the first year of the Plymouth Rock colony, when its governor came across some revelers who had taken Christmas day off and forced them to return to work. The observance of Christmas was declared a criminal offense by the Massachusetts General Court in 1659.

My own great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother, a woman named Dorothy Jones, was convicted in the town of Wilmington, near Philadelphia, in 1672 of “propagating ye Throne of wickedness.” According to court records, she was charged with “masking” in men’s clothes the day after Christmas, “walking and dancing in the house of John Simes at 9 or 10 o’clock at night.’” Simes, who hosted the party, was charged with keeping a disorderly house, “a nursery of Debotch ye inhabitants and youth of this city… to ye greef of and disturbance of peaceful minds.”

As the old winter festivities became repressed they turned more bitter and vehement. Christmas carolers, or wassailers, asserted their right to seasonal largess with the threat of violence. A Scottish wassailing song contains such lines as

We’ve come here to claim our right …

And if you don’t open up your door,

We’ll lay it flat upon the floor …

God bless the mistress and her man,

Dish and table, pot and pan:

Here’s to the one with yellow hair,

She’s hiding underneath the stair:

Be you maids or be you none,

Although our time may not be long,

You’ll all be kissed ere we go home.

Young men from the fringes of society formed bands who went from house to house demanding gifts of food and drink. One wassailing song asserted the petitioners’ right to sample the lord’s best goods and not just ordinary stock:

Come, butler, draw us a bowl of the best

Then we hope your soul in heaven shall rest

But if you draw us a bowl of the small

Then down will come butler, bowl, and all

If the petitioners were not let in, they would sometimes enter homes by force. On Christmas night of 1679 one landholder near Salem refused to grant the demands of such a gang of young men. His case is known through the court record it has left; it is retold in Stephen Nissenbaum’s excellent “The Battle for Christmas.” After his refusal, he testified, “they threw stones, bones, and other things … They continued to throw stones for an hour and a half with little intermission. They also broke down about a pole and a half of fence, being stone wall, and a cellar, without the house, distant about four or five rods, was broken open through the door, and five or six pecks of apples were stolen.”

The colonists succeeded, with difficulty, in suppressing Christmas for a time, but immigrants to North America from other parts of Europe (such as Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia) continued to bring their various seasonal traditions with them. With a more diverse populace, by the beginning of the 19th century Christmas was on the way to revival. It emerged from its years of suppression in a new form. Since each group observed the holiday in its own way, it no longer took the form of a rowdy public festival, gradually becoming transformed into a quieter domestic observance.

Gift-giving had not been a feature of traditional Christmas celebrations, which had emphasized feasting and drinking. But over the course of the 19th century, with the growth of industrialization, as manufacturers looked to develop new markets, the holiday became commercialized. Though some employers, like Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge, still saw it as a kind of scam, when he was forced to “pay a day’s wages for no work,” others made a different calculation — they saw the momentarily idle workers as a potential market for their products. By the end of the century, it became customary in the U.S. to purchase and exchange manufactured goods at Christmastime.

In the end it was probably a bad deal for the workers. What was once a worker-oriented festival had been subsumed into an economic system that in recent years has resulted in staggering levels of economic inequality. “My little girl don’t understand why Daddy can’t afford no Christmas here,” Merle Haggard once sang. Today, as SantaCon meets and mingles with the Occupy movement, people are again demanding a better share of the wealth during the holiday season. It might be wise to take their protests seriously. There are centuries of tradition behind them.

This year has been particularly illustrative, as the fake outrage machine has caricatured itself like a Bigfoot-esque monster truck in a desperate bid for attention. In just the last few weeks, the Heritage Foundation billed an Agriculture Department initiative to raise revenue for tree farmers as a “Christmas Tree Tax”; Fox News said that standard federal safety warnings were proof that the government wants to “tell you how to decorate your Christmas tree”; and conservative activists criticized Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee, an Independent, for daring to consecrate a “holiday tree” — rather than a “Christmas Tree” — at the statehouse.

Meanwhile, under the headline “‘Modern Grinches Step Up Anti-Christmas Efforts,” the Christian Broadcasting Network lashed out at cities for trying to respect the separation of church and state at holiday time, and the American Family Association continued its annual effort to denigrate companies that substitute “Happy Holidays” for “Merry Christmas.”

To know that this machine’s outrage is indeed fake is to appreciate some telling facts about the alleged transgressions. For instance, the government’s recent revenue and regulatory moves were entirely routine and nonreligious, while Gov. Chafee was just preserving a long-standing tradition in a state founded as a haven for religious pluralism. Similarly, many cities are still including Christmas in their winter festivities — they are just including other celebrations as well. And if saying “Happy Holidays” somehow represents a “War on Christmas,” then none other than Christian icon Tim Tebow must be one of the aggressors’ lead field generals, what with the NFL quarterback now appearing in a television ad wishing Coloradans “Happy Holidays” — not “Merry Christmas.”

These facts, of course, are no deterrent to the fake outrage machine, because the machine’s operators aren’t really interested in preventing religious bigotry. In a majority-Christian nation whose politics and culture are steeped in Christianity, these zealots are interested in pretending their fellow Christians are somehow oppressed, contradictory facts be damned.

In propagating such an illusion, they’re not earnestly embodying their religion’s missionary spirit. Instead, they’re manufacturing victimhood, all to gin up sympathy and create a rationale to continue ramrodding their theology down everyone else’s throats.

That some feel this need to push their faith with such craven tactics speaks volumes about the nature of spiritual self-doubt today. Sure, our tumultuous world of bombast and chaos leads us to assume that the loudest are the most devout. But in practice, those who are truly comfortable in their faith are often the most humble about their orthodoxies because they have nothing to prove. By contrast, those who are the most insecure in their beliefs can sometimes be the most in-your-face about their dogma.

In that sense, there’s a “doth protest too much” tenor to the roar of the fake outrage machine. That self-indicting message may be difficult to detect amid all the exploding ordnance in the War on Christmas, but it’s there — and the more the machine revs its engines every December, the more that message comes through.

One major factor in the decline of Christianity here: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Arab-Israeli war of 1948 caused hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to flee or be driven out of their homes, most never to return – and each subsequent war has led to more Palestinians leaving. Today, though Palestinians are often materially better off than other Arabs, restrictions on movement, lack of economic opportunity, unemployment and the constant indignity of living under occupation prompt many to seek out new homes. Palestinian Christians, relatively better educated that Palestinian Muslims and sharing a common religion with the West, have generally been better placed to leave the region.

“Many Christians prioritize their religion over their nationality, thus feeling at home in Western Christian countries as immigrants,” says Ameer Sader, who teaches English and works as a young guide at the National Museum of Science and Technology in Haifa.

“Also, the fertility rate among Christians is the lowest within Israel and Palestine, playing a role, however small it is, in their decline,” he added.

But the exodus is not solely a Christian phenomenon.

“What is often ignored is the huge number of young Muslims who are leaving. And don’t forget there are more Palestinian Muslims living abroad than Christians,” says Dimitri Karkar, a Palestinian Christian businessman. Karkar lives in Ramallah, which has grown with the influx of refugees from other parts of historic Palestine and Israel’s continued annexation of East Jerusalem. Once a small village, Ramallah has become the de facto administrative capital of Palestine, where about a quarter of its population today is Christian.

Another factor: Christian charities and missionaries, who often do valuable work here, also have played an unwitting role in the exodus of Christians.

“I think that an awful lot of well-meaning Christians in the West, whether they are in America, Britain or other places, have poured a lot of money into the West Bank, and specifically into the churches and ministries here,” observes Richard Meryon, director of Jerusalem’s Garden Tomb, which is locked in a spiritual/territorial dispute with the nearby Church of the Holy Sepulchre over the exact location of the crucifixion, burial and resurrection of Jesus.

This outside aid, he notes, “is causing a hemorrhaging of Palestinian believers,” because many are given assistance to move to the West to study but, once there, decide never to return. At the same time, he points out, the numbers of foreign believers and Messianic Jews who believe in Jesus are rising.

And not all Christian activity has been “well-meaning.” For example, so-called Christian Zionists are passionately, even virulently, pro-Israeli, and many come to the Holy Land (some on Harley Davidsons) to express their support. They show rather less interest in the Christians who actually live there.

Republican presidential contender Newt Gingrich seems to even doubt they exist. In an apparent bid to court the Christian Zionist and pro-Israel right, Gingrich made the outrageous claim that “We have invented the Palestinian people,” as if the Palestinians I encounter every day here are figments of the imagination.

Foreign Christians and pilgrims tend to romanticize the “purity” of Christmas in the Holy Land. “Christmas here is fantastic because there’s absolutely no sign of the trappings of materialism,” says Meryon. “People in England hardly know the difference between Santa Claus and Jesus,” he jokes. Meryon has something of the quintessential English vicar about him, while a group of Singaporean pilgrims sing melodic hymns in the background. “Commercialism has taken Jesus out of Christmas.”

And the guitar-strumming young Singaporean who had led his evangelist group of pilgrims in song seemed to share Meryon’s sentiments. “Being here is incredible. I can see Jesus all around me,” he said, I imagine, figuratively. Lacking any semblance of religious faith and not being of a spiritual disposition, I have never seen Christ figuratively, in all my time in Jerusalem. I have, however, repeatedly spotted a pilgrim fitting his description making his lonely way through the old city.

For obvious reasons, Bethlehem, whose population today is still about half Christian, is a popular pull for local Christians and pilgrims alike, with the highlight for the faithful being the midnight Mass at the Church of the Nativity on Christmas Eve. And, as with Joseph and Mary, those who wait for the last minute often find that there’s no more room at the inn.

But given that the vast majority of the population is either Jewish or Muslim, the run-up to the holiday season in the public sphere is pretty low-key. “You see some decoration around, but Christmas here is a normal time of year,” says Karkar.

This demographic reality inevitably affects the spirit of the season. “On Christmas Day, the majority of people are working, so most Christians work too,” notes Karkar, although he does point out that Orthodox Christmas, which is on Jan. 7, has been made a public holiday for Christians and Muslims alike in the West Bank. “My wife and kids are traveling but I have to keep my restaurant open.”

“Christmas here feels spiritless and meaningless in comparison to the West,” Sader told me. “I’ve had the opportunity to celebrate Christmas in Paris. I felt the religious meaning of Christmas for two weeks long, as the midnight Mass was an integral part of Christmas and the highlight of the celebrations,” adding that he is not a religious person.

Sader’s idealized description of Christmas in Paris might come as something of a revelation to many Europeans, who never see the inside of a church and, instead, make offerings for their loved ones at the altar of consumerism and find the merry “spirit” of the season inside a bottle shared with family and friends.

The reality of Christmas here seems to me to lie somewhere between what Sader and Meryon describe. In a land where people are generally more religious than in the West – whether they be Christians, Muslims or Jews – church attendance is high.

Palestinian Christians I have met in Palestine and Israel insist that, although they may face a certain amount of discrimination from the country’s two major faith groups, especially with the rising tide of Islamic and Jewish fundamentalism, they are by no means persecuted.

“There is no Islamic persecution here,” insists Karkar, who points out that it was a Muslim, the late Yasser Arafat, who not only symbolized national unity by marrying a Christian but also restored the status of Christmas in Bethlehem after years of Israeli-imposed isolation had made it impossible for Palestinian Christians from other parts to visit the birthplace of Christ. Karkar also contends that even the Islamist movement, Hamas, is not “anti-Christian.”

The future of Christianity in the Holy Land will depend largely on whether Israelis and Palestinians will be able to find a just resolution to their conflict. If peace and justice reign, many diaspora Palestinian Christians may be encouraged to return. If not, the decline of indigenous Christianity in the birthplace of Jesus is likely to continue.

As I got older, some of my classmates who sought the five-finger discount came to me directly, hoping I’d grab for them what they feared to take themselves. I trace the evolution of the ’60s counterculture through their requests. When we were high school freshman, they wanted prophylactics and cough syrup. By the time we reached senior year, it was blank prescription pads and several hundred empty gelatin capsules, to be filled with who knows what homemade hallucinogen.

In those days, before the notion of Black Friday spread across the land and early rising consumers clamored for the privilege of getting stomped upon and pepper sprayed, my father’s busiest time at the store wasn’t the day after Thanksgiving but the day after Christmas, when holiday items were steeply discounted and customers arrived to exchange gifts received or complain about faulty products. Each complaint was handled with aplomb, cash returned or merchandise traded, no questions asked.

So having been raised to honor the sanctity of the complaint, when I reached my majority, I took my own complaining very seriously, drafting letters of such savage wit, spellbinding rhetoric and logic that any commercial enterprise in receipt thereof was compelled to immediately see the error of its ways and yield. Or so I imagined.

I always copied my missives to the Better Business Bureau and once — in the matter of a defective watch battery from Macy’s — received from a woman who worked at the bureau the epistolary equivalent of a standing ovation. Several years later, when my then-wife was having problems with a furniture store coming through with the proper door for a new credenza, I drafted a complaint letter in her name and copied the BBB. A note came back from the same woman, announcing — and I am not making this up — that it was the best one she’d read since that guy with the bad watch battery. Okay, maybe she simply noticed that the return address was the same, but in that moment it felt like I had won the Academy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Whining, Original or Adapted.

Now, however, complaints go largely unanswered. I blame this, at least in part, on the Internet. Websites for stores or other businesses more often than not have a place where you can register a grievance but they disappear into cyberspace like those microwave transmissions of “Leave It to Beaver” now racing past Alpha Centauri, never to be heard from again unless alien civilizations have a twisted sense of humor and a desire for revenge.

In the last few months, I’ve dutifully typed onto my screen various grievances to various companies, including a hotel where, if the sheets were indeed changed daily it was from bed to bed, and a drugstore chain, the branch of which in my neighborhood more and more resembles a Matthew Brady photo of the day after Gettysburg — if you replaced the bodies strewn on the ground with toothpaste cartons, containers of painkiller and shredded circulars.

Not one has been answered, which makes it all the more frustrating that when a store — the hardware behemoth Lowe’s Home Improvement — proves the exception and finally does respond to a complaint, it’s not for anything legitimate but in reaction to a right wing fringe organization’s hysteria over a cable reality show that depicts Muslims as normal people instead of terrorists. Lowe’s pulled its commercials from the TLC series “All American Muslim” (as did some other companies), reportedly caving to pressure from the Florida Family Association (FFA), a group which apparently consists of a single paid employee — its president — and a mailing list of an alleged 35,000 members. (Lowe’s now says the FFA did not force its decision; it was “negative chatter about the show…  appearing on social networks.”)

What’s more, I noticed the other day that Mark Ryan, who retired last year from his job as chief executive of the drugstore chain to which I complained — CVS Caremark — was one of the 10 most highly paid bosses in America. That’s according to the corporate governance group GMI Ratings. The New York Times reports, “In his last year at CVS he received total compensation of $29.2 million and an additional $50.4 million from stock awards and options.” He’s now an operating partner with Advent International, a private equity firm specializing in corporate buyouts. Which is interesting because during the time he was CEO at CVS, its stock price dropped by more than half.

Therefore, as my Christmas gift to the 1 Percent, here’s a suggestion to Ryan and all you other “job creators.” Take back some of those millions in executive compensation and invest them in real customer service. Generate work — hire people to take care of the people who buy your products and sincerely, productively respond to their concerns and problems, just like the good old days.

Admittedly, I did find one other exception, which is why I have to get over to Starbucks. The other evening, I was griping because they ran out of the stuff they put in their holiday eggnog lattes. They gave me a coupon for a free drink. Say what you will about the caffeine empire — they know how to handle a complaint.

So in the words of “The Simpsons’” Krusty the Klown, “”Have a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah, Kwazy Kwanzaa, a tip-top Tet, and a solemn, dignified Ramadan.” And speaking of complaints, I just know I’ll be hearing about this.