Christmas is a holiday of peace and goodwill. Families come together, angry friends forgive each other, everyone celebrates with a combination of happiness, champagne, and melancholy, and all those things we see in Frank Capra movies. It is difficult for anyone of any religion, or even an agnostic, to be offended by this celebration. But what I find puzzling is that celebrating the holiday with lights and Christmas motifs is now becoming frowned upon not, as one might expect, in Karachi or Mogadishu, but in the heart of Old Europe.

The gradual cancellation of Christmas in countries such as France, Spain, the United Kingdom or Germany is perhaps the most worrying symptom of the West’s renunciation of its Judeo-Christian cultural identity. It is happening at all levels: from governments and city councils to schools and associations. As ever, it’s the secularists of the socialist left, behind the facade of “inclusivity,” who are the most determined to cancel Christmas, which for centuries has been celebrated in style throughout the continent. Indeed, it has been celebrated as a festivity of the union, not segregation, between different peoples. What Ronald Reagan explained simply and in his own unique way, that “Christmas is a holiday that we celebrate not as individuals nor as a nation, but as a human family,” now appears entirely incomprehensible.

Let’s look at some examples of what is happening in Europe. In November, the head teacher of Wherwell Primary School, in Andover, England, informed parents that there would be no reference to Christmas in the school’s traditional festive pantomime, in order to be “inclusive.” Since “Christmas songs were included in the performance,” and some parents usually prevent their children from attending on religious grounds, the head teacher wrote, “We have requested that the show contain no reference to Christmas.” According to the 2021 census, 62.4% of Andover’s then-50,887 residents identified as Christian, compared with 0.6% who are Muslim.

The trend of canceling Christmas in European schools didn’t start this year, it simply spreads from one December to the next like an oil slick at sea. The first major controversy occurred in 2011, when kindergartens and schools in Denmark canceled their traditional Christmas celebrations so as not to offend Muslims, who are already the second-largest religion in the country, and who are densely concentrated in ghettos in large cities.

France, the European country with the most immigrants of Arab origin, has also been de-Christianizing Christmas for years. After the jihadist attack against a Christmas market in Strasbourg in 2018, far from redoubling the defense of freedom and pride in their Christian traditions, political leaders intensified the secularist drift, and this year there are already a majority of French cities whose authorities have decided to eliminate Christian referencing in Christmas celebrations, sometimes going to ridiculous extremes. Nantes is now celebrating its “Winter Journey” (whatever that means), Angers is observing “Winter Suns,” Bordeaux is touting “Bordeaux in festivities,” and Saint Denis is holding a Christmas vacation called “Destination Beautiful Winter” while its mayor celebrates the holiday by shouting “Happy Winter!” The official festive brochure of this French community includes puppets, fire-eaters, craft workshops for children, and no iconic Christian Christmas imagery.

In France, the madness was best captured, ironically, by a French Muslim deliveryman in a video that went viral. In it, he relayed how, on one of his deliveries this year, he noticed that Christmas decorations and nativity scenes were absent at a town hall in the countryside. The mayor told him that the state had sent out instructions that there should be no decorations in city halls, which the Muslim man found “scandalous”: “Our friends the Christians, our brothers, they are in a Christian country. Yes, laïcité, fine. But, no. They have the right to decorate their town hall for their holiday. Mangers don’t bother me … Politicians, you are going to kill France, you are going to kill Christians! It’s crazy!” the man exclaimed.

In Spain things are not much better, perhaps because, as they say there, fish always rots from the head. The prime minister received a lot of criticism this year for his supposed Christmas greeting (“Here’s to a new year full of health, hope and prosperity. Happy holidays”) in which he expressly avoided congratulating Christians on Christmas, while a few months ago he had no qualms about congratulating Muslims by expressly referencing “Ramadan.” Also, several municipalities governed by extreme left mayors have limited to a minimum Christmas decorations in the streets and removed from their festive programs anything that might sound minimally Christian.

Paradoxically, despite the Spanish socialist government’s attempts to turn off Christmas, private life, as so often happens, marches to the beat of its own drum. So-called company Christmas dinners, gatherings where people celebrate such an important date with their work colleagues, and which often end in the wee hours of the morning, are becoming more and more popular and bigger—though not without risk, as Phyllis Diller remarked: “What I don’t like about office Christmas parties is looking for a job the next day.”

These examples of Christmas cancellation in Spain, France, the U.K., or Denmark, can similarly be found in Belgium, Germany, Sweden, and many other European countries. None of this could happen without the European left and social democrats. The same parties that have promoted mass immigration have now pioneered a strange paradox: promoting secularism to expel Christianity from all institutions, starting with the classrooms, and at the same time, attending the constant requests of Muslim communities to promote Islamic teachings and traditions, again, especially in schools.

The main problem with mass Muslim immigration in the West is their very low rate of assimilation in the host cultures. But what’s more dangerous is that native leaders are so determined to deny their own identity, and their Judeo-Christian cultural heritage which should only be a source of pride, and not the burden that seems to weigh them down now.

For years, many private organizations have also been joining in the cultural change. Despite the fact that Christmas season is the most important one of the year for large retailers, many leading European brands have been replacing in their stores any minimally Christian reference with an amalgam of lights, random messages—“hope,” “love,” “happiness”—and mountains of snow in the decoration, since cold and winter have always been the favorite alternative for those who wish to remove themselves from any religious association, for fear of a possible boycott by radical groups.

All this leads us to conclude that the main problem of the West’s cultural and identity decadence lies not so much in external aggressors as in internal betrayals and renunciations. “To the end, I will remain a child of Europe, of worry and of shame; I have no message of hope to deliver,” wrote Michel Houellebecq in Platform, “for the West, I do not feel hatred; at most I feel a great contempt. I know only that every single one of us reeks of selfishness, masochism and death. We have created a system in which it has simply become impossible to live; and what’s more, we continue to export it.”

To restore its confidence and sense of self, the West—each one of its sovereign nations—should look at the way Jews care for, respect, and take pride in their nation, their history, their religion, their traditions. Contrast Europe’s cultural clashes with the peaceful, mutually enriching cultural coexistence offered by the Jewish experience in the United States. It is no accident that some of the most beautiful and melancholy Christmas songs have come from Jewish composers and lyricists such as Irving Berlin, Mel Tormé, Bob Wells, Felix Bernard, Jay Livingston, Ralph Blane, and Johnny Marks.

No Christian would expect these songs to be a loudspeaker for religious beliefs they did not share. Still, these songwriters, immigrants or sons of immigrants desperately eager to assimilate in America and to express their love for it and for its customs, were able to help us all celebrate Christmas and the traditions that we associate with its celebration, including the importance of bringing family together, paying more attention to the disadvantaged, trying to recover lost friendships, or missing our elders, the ancestors who can no longer sit at the table with us on Christmas Eve, and to whom we owe everything we are, including what we are culturally.

Religious beliefs are integral to who we are as human beings. And in a healthy society, harmonious coexistence, and mutual respect between people of different religions of their respective holidays, should be the norm. The capitulation that so many European leaders are spearheading will only embolden radicals and forestall migrant assimilation. And when they come to demand more, the dissolved identity of our people will no longer have the strength to stand up and claim a space of freedom to celebrate the traditions of our own Judeo-Christian heritage. It will then be too late.

Itxu Díaz is a Spanish journalist, political satirist, author, and columnist at several Spanish magazines and newspapers. His latest book, I Will Not Eat Crickets: An Angry Satirist Declares War on the Globalist Elite, was recently released in the U.S.