We all know that the “Holiday Season” starts much too early and ends too abruptly at 6 p.m. Christmas night, when we either escape from the relatives to curl up in post-prandial comas, or pile into minivans to see some ludicrous “holiday” movie that on any other day would rate as “barely a rental.” Each year the decorations go up a few days sooner. Christmas has already gorged itself on Thanksgiving, and soon will begin to efface the spiritual meaning of Jack o’ Lanterns. By the time I shuffle off this mortal coil — probably at the hands of a faithful reader/sniper — I’ve no doubt that Santaclaustide will be competing with Labor Day, and that each parade of Teamsters will have to include some reindeer.

What we in liturgical churches know — because annoying purists on social media whom we have forgotten to block incessantly remind us — is that the Christmas season only begins at sundown, December 24, and continues right up through Candlemas on February 2, the feast that marks the Virgin Mary presenting Jesus in the Temple. If you too would like to be an annoying purist, you could hold on off on Christmas decorations until the very eve, then leave your browning pine boughs and fraying, flickering lights to irritate neighbors for another full six weeks. Consider it “evangelizing” as you snicker across the fence.

Chances are that if you were such a purist, you wouldn’t be reading this ecumenical website, “on principle,” so let’s move on to the rest of us. And no I won’t speak of Festivus, which my family tacks on to Christmas each year, marking both with a Yuletide dinner at a New York Chinese restaurant. That’s because no one will admit that it’s his or her turn to cook, and anyway it feels right to honor Jesus, Mary and Joseph in the company of their fellow Jews. Senator Rand Paul has already claimed Festivus as the holiday for liberty lovers, and they have plenty of grievances to air, especially this year.

Instead, let me remind you that traditionally there are twelve full days of Christmas celebrations, starting on Christmas Day, and ending at Epiphany, January 6, when we celebrate the arrival of the Magi to visit Jesus in Bethlehem.

And the godless leftists who rule our culture and our country have thoughtfully remembered to give us enough gifts to cover all Twelve Days of Christmas, offering us in just the past few weeks some really extraordinary reminders of how out of touch they are with ordinary people. Each one can be used as a “teaching moment” for any centrist or undecided voters you retain as friends or relatives. In fact it might be worth excerpting these dozen moments of maximum madness, and tweeting a different one each day, right up through New Year’s morning.

1. The reporting on the Colorado Shooting. A tinfoil hatted, dog-shooting, pot-smoking voyeur and skinny dipper shoots people at random near an abortion clinic. He is labeled a “white Christian terrorist,” and President Obama calls for confiscating the guns from law-abiding citizens — you know, the only people who might actually turn in their guns.
2. The media buzz on the San Bernardino shooting. Coming close on the heels of the Colorado Tinfoil Hat Attack, this carefully planned assault by a pair of Muslim immigrants on a Christmas party was initially spun as another act of — you guessed it — White Christian Terror. While the shooters were still holed up with the pipe bombs that neighbors hadn’t reported them stockpiling for fear of seeming “racist,” Bloomberg Business News tweeted that the attack was “within two miles” of a Planned Parenthood clinic. Of course, in California, it would be hard to find an office complex or shopping center that wasn’t. So from now on, every shooting in that state will be pre-emptively reported as “possible pro-life terrorism” against “abortion providers.”
3. CNN’s foreign policy genius Fareed Zakaria comparing Donald Trump to Hitler. Because he’s a helpless Muslim immigrant who went to a British boarding school, then Yale and Harvard, and now has a prime-time TV show, but Donald Trump is making him feel exactly like Anne Frank in the attic.
4.  Vox’s shocking report that animals are killing each other, getting sick, and starving all across America’s wilderness, and the federal government is doing nothing about it. This is what liberals think it means to be “pro-life,” folks.
5. President Obama’s response to a rash of Muslim terrorist attacks throughout the West: welcoming more Muslim immigrants — from camps which they’d violently purged of Christians — and promising to close Gitmo. Apparently his “catch and release” policy toward illegal immigrants will now apply to terrorists.
6. Muslim “refugees” who fled to Europe in fear for their lives, who now are offended by Europeans’ “unwelcoming attitude” and insufficient welfare benefits, so they’re turning around and going home. Apparently, it’s safe now, wherever they came from. More than 1 million Muslims have entered the West in 2015. Count on leftist elites to demand that we admit still more, or be tarred as racists because we fear the tenets of a religion.
7. A left-wing British professor’s answer to a letter from an Israeli girl asking sweetly for information about horses, which she loves. The professor writes her back a savage note, rebuking the 13-year-old for Israeli “injustices” toward Palestinians. Apparently, the Boycott Israel movement even extends to schoolgirls.
8. The Washington Post marks the Christmas season with glowing reviews of sacrilegious books about Jesus, including What Would Jesus Craft, which features projects such as “Last Supper Lunch Box,” and the “Fedora of Thorns.”
9. The Washington Post (again), publishes an editorial cartoon depicting Ted Cruz’s adorable young daughters as equally adorable trained monkeys on leashes. Sure, they’re in pre-school and grade school, and children (such as Obama’s) are generally off-limits to political attack. But this cartoonist has won an award for celebrating Planned Parenthood; given her attitude toward children, maybe Cruz’s daughters got off easy.
10. Hundreds of Yale students sign a fake petition to repeal the First Amendment, while dozens at George Mason University line up to ban “White Christmas” as … racist.
11. Harvard College’s colorful “Diversity Placemats” with talking points to help indoctrinated students brainwash their parents on issues ranging from Muslim refugees to BlackLivesMatter — as they choke on Christmas dinner.
12. Okay, to be bipartisan, this one comes from Republicans (albeit the more liberal ones). GOP insiders’ reaction to the rise of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz: plotting a brokered convention before a single primary vote has even been cast. These people would rather dispense with primaries, perhaps even with voters. Every four years they could just gather the billionaires and pick a king.

In case you want to delve deeper into why secular progressives have gone off the deep end, not just philosophically but psychologically, check out the two-part series I wrote with Jason Jones, “A User’s Guide to Godless Liberalism,” Part I, and (especially) Part II.