Now that Bill O’Reilly has declared Mission Accomplished in the War on Christmas™, it may be a good time to redeploy our forces to the battle for New Years Day.

What? You say you’ve never heard of the War On New Years? Well, the New Years War is indeed less well known than the Christmas conflagration. It could be characterized as the Afghanistan of the Holiday Hostilities. But like Afghanistan, it is fully engaged and may have even more significance than other Season’s Grievings.

The battle, as always, is centered on a religious dispute. The celebration commemorating the passing of the year is based on a calendar that presumes time began with the birth of Christ. However, according to heathens like Secular Progressives and, let’s say, Jews, it is not the dawning of 2008 at all. The Jewish calendar is already up to 5768, having been based on a Biblical triviality that no one cares about anymore – the year G-d created the Earth and everything else. And Rosh Hashanah rings in the new year sometime around September.

It’s fair to say that the enemies of New Years have not been as successful as the enemies of Christmas. There are no major department stores that prohibit their employees from wishing their customers a Happy New Year, and New Years decorations can be displayed even in government facilities. Although there have been scattered reports of pagan retailers compelling greetings to be confined to “Happy Gregorian Day.”

Women’s groups are also up in arms due to the traditional characterization of time as an old man, as in “Father Time.” Mother Time is nowhere to be found. This is particularly disturbing because the New Year is often depicted as an infant who was seemingly conceived by its father.

While the ACLU has yet to take any War on New Years cases, it is just a matter of … um … time. It would be better to prepare for battle than to be caught off guard and find ourselves reduced to wishing each other a Happy New Orbit Around the Sun.

Actually, that doesn’t sound half bad. Happy Orbit Day everybody!