Don't Get Me Started On The Stupid Elf

If you ran a popular chain of coffee houses, would you pay somebody to fake lame outrage against you on social media?  

For those of you who have been living in a hole, over the last week or so, Facebook has erupted with people complaining about a popular chain of coffee restaurants who shall remain nameless until they decide to sponsor us.  The source of the consternation: Red cups.  

Yes, the simple fact that the coffee chain, who supplies millions upon millions of people of all races, genders, creeds, and intelligence levels has decided to use red cups made people throw a fit.  The reasoning, of course, is that the cups do not specifically call out Christmas during the "Holiday Season."  The whining has been incessant, with some national public figures even calling for a boycott of the popular java joint in protest of their "War on Christmas."  

This is lunacy.  

Part of the problem here is "Christmas Creep."  That the aforementioned "Holiday Season" now stretches from Mid-October until sometime in late January.  Christmas Proper takes up precisely one of these days, while other holidays, including (but certainly not limited to) Halloween, Thanksgiving, Veterans Day, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, New Years Eve, and New Years Day are also available within the time window.  For anyone to expect the world to appreciate Christmas, and exclusively Christmas, during this entire time is not only selfish, it's short-sighted, missing out on all the other wonderful holiday days that are included.  When the "Christmas Season" was confined to actually Christmas, Christmas Eve, and maybe 10 other days (According to the song), it would be a little more justified to decry the lack of "Christmas" references during that time.  But now that Christmas is three months long, it somewhat deserves to lose a little bit of its cachet.  It's a full quarter of the year, for crying in the sink.  You don't get to be that special.  

Yes, people are upset about the red cups that don't say "Merry Christmas."   I have a theory, which makes a lot more sense than somebody actually being offended by this perceived slight.  I believe that the popular coffee chain paid some person or small group of scattered people a mildly generous sum of money to go onto their social media and throw a world-class hissy over the lack of specific Christmas-related imagery on a piece of cardboard that will last about 30 seconds longer than the coffee that is placed into it.  Almost immediately, in the digital age, the outrage spreads like wildfire, with people vowing to start boycotting the coffee chain (which there's no way they'll actually do), and many many more rising to the defense of the coffee chain and taking up the coffee mantle by supporting the chain and buying their wares.  Millions of Facebook and Twitter messages, coverage in the media, non-stop publicity, millions more cups of coffee, and all for a small fee of paying a few people to pretend to care about the color of their cups.