Review: Squidbillies “The War on The War on Christmas”

Happy Hanukkah this Tuesday!

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Dan Halen stands on a float in front of the local mall as he celebrates the newly named Winter Solstice Festival, showing the Evergreen of Seasonal Inclusiveness, a giant foliage full of many denominational symbols. This is a very thinly veiled way of getting people shopping, though naturally Early is pissed about this level of equal treatment and vows war on the non-Christmas holidays. Literally nailing himself to a giant cross while dressed like Jesus, Early heads to Starbucks to get the barista to say explicitly and increasingly Christian things as he orders coffee after coffee until he gets the $70,000 bill. He then crashes the manger reenactment and gets them to go caroling, but with custom songs that really enforce the Christmas spirit. At home with the family, he gives out gifts he made himself since no company only says “Merry Christmas”, but they instead go to the Winter Solstice Festival, enraging Early. At the mall, Halen laments his profit margins aren’t up, but Sheriff assures him he did the right thing for the holidays, which is kind of undercut by him having a huge erection. This is interrupted by Early, dangling Baby Randy from the top of the giant tree to get everyone to say Merry Christmas all year round. Denny manages to get Randy back but it topples the tree. Early lives, but injures most everyone else, and he gets shit for it going at least halfway through the following year.

OUR TAKE

Welp, this was pretty much what you can expect from a Squidbillies episode in 2017, giving us everything from Starbucks cups to non-denominational holiday names to Neil Degrasse Tyson. Early, being the show’s mouthpiece for zany conservative alt-right conspiracy nonsense is in full force as representing the phony outrage at PC culture and its effect on the winter holidays. And while it’s not exactly doing something new with much of this, it does show a more moderate message by the end when Dan Halen bypasses his forced neutral name for the tree and just goes with what everyone knows. Essentially, don’t deliberately force people to celebrate exactly like you, but don’t bend over backward just to accommodate everyone. Just let everyone do things their own way and things will work out. Unless someone wants to dangle a child from a tree, then intervention is necessary.