By now, I assume, all rational, fact-loving people understand that there never was a "War on Christmas", despite howling protestations from "anti-PC" crusaders on both sides of the Atlantic. In Britain, Birmingham city council never did replace Christmas with a secular celebration called Winterval, to avoid offending Muslims (or anyone else); a hospital in Edinburgh never did ban a Christmas CD because it mentioned Jesus (or for any other reason). In the US, a Texan school district never did ban red and green clothing; the Gap never did ban the word "Christmas" from its TV advertising; the White House Christmas tree was never renamed a "holiday tree"; the one at the Capitol was, a few years back, but it's been a Christmas tree again since 1995, through all the angriest years of the 'Christmas controversy'. An atheists-versus-Christians squabble over a Santa Monica park – where all displays have been banned, not just Christmas ones, apparently because the city of Santa Monica has no desire to take sides in any "war" – has sputtered and died. The War on Christmas was a non-story from the start.

What's genuinely fascinating, though, is what's happened to the War on the War on Christmas. In the UK, it's all but vanished. In the US, meanwhile, the fight has been left almost exclusively to Bill O'Reilly of Fox News, who battles on, like a holdout Japanese World War Two soldier in the Pacific. And the pressure of solitary warriorhood seems to be getting to him.

O'Reilly has taken to insisting – as he did during a shouting match with the president of American Atheists the other day – that "Christianity is not a religion, it's a philosophy", presumably (though he never explains his reasoning) because only religions are covered by the separation of church and state. He has been hounding the governor of Rhode Island, Lincoln Chafee, for using the phrase "holiday tree" to describe the tree at the Rhode Island statehouse, and for not hosting a tree-lighting ceremony there – even though the ceremony was seemingly cancelled only because War on Christmas protestors sabotaged it last year.

He has been forced to do battle with Father Jonathan Morris, a regular Fox News contributor and Catholic priest who dismisses Fox's fight to save Christmas as "silly", and who told O'Reilly he disagreed with his innovative position about Christianity not being a religion. ("Christianity is a religion," O'Reilly was forced to concede, "but it's a philosophy that is being… administered by different religions.")

And he has started lashing out randomly at pretty much any use of the word "holiday", a decades-old linguistic feature of wintertime in this secular republic – so traditional and un-War-on-Christmassy, in fact, that Fox News uses it all the time.

Maybe I'm imagining it, but I think a hint of acknowledged self-parody has crept into O'Reilly's on-screen demeanour. The "War on Christmas" has always been a rabble-rousing fantasy. O'Reilly has presumably always known this. But now he knows that we know; the blowhard and his viewers (and perhaps even the president of American Atheists, grateful for the attention) are sharing the joke together.

It's not hard to see why the War on Christmas should have devolved into this postmodern piece of performance art. It is O'Reilly's misfortune to be spearheading the anti-PC lobby's annual exercise in myth-construction precisely at the moment when the credibility of the conservative myth machine is at its lowest ebb. In these weeks immediately following election night, when reality collided noisily – and, most awkwardly, live on Fox – with the Rovian fantasy bubble, even the most committed Fox viewer must understand, on some level, that what they're watching isn't factual, but simply entertainment.

The people who voted for Barack Obama were mainly religious. He won the Catholic vote. As O'Reilly himself so classlessly acknowledged, it was a diverse, "non-traditional" coalition that assured the president's re-election. Are we, remarkably, reaching the point at which "showing a modest amount of respect for the feelings of people who aren't like you" is recognised as a basic component of civil behaviour, instead of a terrible threat to free speech? (Note also that interest in "political correctness" more generally is dwindling, as measured by Google; in Britain, the term has gone in search of new meanings, and now gets applied to any controversial decision viewed as leftwing in motivation.)

Back in Europe, another Christmas miracle: "Winterval", the word that started all the trouble in Britain, has been sufficiently rehabilitated that it's being used in Waterford, in Ireland, for a self-described "Christmas festival" that's happening right now. When it comes to the largely imaginary notion of political correctness, might we finally have got over ourselves? The very notion fills my heart with Snowcember cheer.