Everyone is joyously preparing for Christmas, and all is well with the world. But wait: there’s a powerful person who hates Christmas and wants to ruin it for everyone. Will the villain succeed? Will he be defeated in an all-out battle? Neither. Instead, the special blessings of Christmas prevail peacefully, and not only the holiday, but also a wayward, unhappy soul is saved…

Sound familiar? It’s a tried-and-true plotline that has been used by Charles Dickens (A Christmas Carol), Dr. Seuss (How the Grinch Stole Christmas), and Frank Capra (It’s a Wonderful Life).

The newest version is titled “Christmas with a Capital C” and promises to be one of the hits of the 2010 Christmas season (but not in theaters; it’s being released directly to DVD).

This time, however, the old story is being given something very new: a political twist. The bad guy is anything but a child’s bogeyman; instead, he’s a smug urban atheist who’s determined to impose ACLU-style “separation of church and state” on a traditional, patriotic, and, of course, predominantly Christian small town by obtaining a court order banning its beloved Christmas displays.

Predictably, the liberal media have nothing but scorn to heap on the movie. “Does anyone actually believe in that tired dialectic of humble patriotic small-towners vs. smug urbanites who hate religion?” asks time.com. Without a hint of irony, the site answers its own question with the discovery “some people” still do.

And in a post entitled “The War on Christmas 2010 Starts Now,” Gawker Media sniffs: “The atheists and liberals have been trying to destroy Christmas and Jesus for many years, according to the profitable misinformation-exploitation industry.”

Like the Mafia, those who would remove Christmas from American culture never tire of proclaiming they don’t exist. No wonder they hate this movie. The ending of “Christmas with a Capital C”—the redemption of the atheist—may warm hearts. Its true-to-real-life portrayal of the ongoing war on Christmas, however, shines a cold, bright light on an aspect of contemporary American society that the liberal establishment would rather keep hidden–or at least, not talked about.