The 'War' on Christmas

by Steven B. Orkin

Let’s jump right out of the gate on this:

THERE. IS. NO. WAR.

It’s a fabricated issue. A myth. Indeed, this rhetoric is nothing but a deeply ignorant, dangerously divisive, and impressively delusional exercise in inflammatory paranoia and propaganda. ‘Happy Holidays’ (HH) and ‘Season’s Greetings’ (SG) are NOT harbingers of an insidious plot to kill Santa and eliminate ‘Merry Christmas’ (MC) from the global vernacular. They are NOT weapons of religious persecution, sanitization, and destruction.

They ARE warm, courteous, inclusive phrases that address the fact that not everyone celebrates Christmas.¹ That’s it. That’s the sum of their² meaning and purpose.

“I don’t understand what ‘Happy Holidays’ and ‘Season’s Greetings’ are supposed to mean!” cry some naysayers. “‘Happy Holidays’ can be any holiday! It could be Valentine’s Day, Arbor Day, 4^th of July! Why don’t we just say it all year?! And ‘Season’s Greetings’ can be any season! Why don’t we say it in Spring, Summer, and Fall, too!?”

To which I respond, “Why don’t we?” and “Sounds like a great idea!” This kind of lamebrained commentary³ leads us to an Orkin’s Law:

Orkin’s Law of Premeditated Denseness⁴: Avoiding facts, manipulating information, and otherwise being deliberately obtuse to justify your own position is not a valid ideological path.

It doesn’t take a PhD in Sociology to figure out that if someone is saying HH/SG to you during a period of time in which there are major holidays observed by various religions, that they’re referring to those holidays or that season, specifically. They don’t know what religion you are. They don’t know if you’re going to be offended by someone wishing you MC if you don’t celebrate Christmas. They defaulted to HH/SG to cover all the bases. That’s not offensive. It’s CONSIDERATE!

Let me tell you what IS offensive. The arrogant, entitled, anti-HH/SG attitude of “I celebrate CHRISTMAS!” There’s obviously nothing wrong with stating that you celebrate Christmas if someone asks you or in some other contextually relevant context but to declare it in defiance of HH/SG is rude, arrogant, and ignorant.

If you have expressed such a sentiment, consider this: Let’s say we have a brief interaction during the holiday season⁶. Maybe you hold open a door for me. Maybe I get something off a high store shelf for you. Maybe we just pass each other on the street. As we part ways, you smile and say, “Merry Christmas!” In response, I say, “Hey, I don’t celebrate Christmas. I celebrate Chanukah! How dare you persecute my religion and pretend it doesn’t exist! If you want to say something to me, say ‘Happy Chanukah’. Anything else makes you an anti-Semite! Got it!?”

I’m supremely confident that if I reacted that way to you, you’d think I was a world-class idiot, and you’d be absolutely right.

Back here in Inclusive-Land, the overwhelming majority of HH/SG proponents, including me, don’t believe that HH/SG should replace MC. These statements are intended to enhance the holiday spirit embodied in MC. On a personal level, I appreciate when someone defaults to HH/SG over MC but I likewise never get offended when someone says “Merry Christmas” to me. Indeed, I’m thankful. As far as I’m concerned, all good wishes sincerely offered are deeply appreciated. It’s not the verbal package of the wish that matters. It’s the act of wishing. It’s the idea that someone is making that momentary, divine investment in conveying that sentiment. Given that Christmas is far and away the most popular holiday celebrated here in the US, it’s understandable that most people default to MC over HH/SG.

Additionally, people have no way of knowing I don’t celebrate Christmas, and they certainly have no way of knowing I’m Jewish.⁷ I’m not sure what the numbers are for observers of Kwanzaa, or for followers of Islam or other faiths in the US, but Jews only account for about 3% of the US population. Unless I’m wearing an LED-festooned Chanukah sweater bright enough to run ships ashore, crash airplanes, and trigger epileptic seizures, or I’m walking into a synagogue, it’s not realistic to expect anyone I don’t know to say “Happy Chanukah” to me.

I do, however, feel that public spaces can often do more to be inclusive. This is not to say that I expect stores in a shopping mall to have a 50/50 split of Christmas and Chanukah decorations (or 33/33/33 to account for Kwanzaa. Or 25/25/25/25 to further account for general HH/SG signing), but I can’t deny that if I walk into a store and they have NO Chanukah decorations or products, or they’re stuck on a single shelf in the back corner of the store (or if their signing is exclusively Christmas), I feel a bit disenfranchised. That doesn’t mean I have a hissy fit with the store manager, splatter angry social media posts all over the internet, and refuse to shop there EVER. It means I’m more likely to shop somewhere else.

“We shouldn’t have to have HH/SG or Chanukah/Kwanzaa signs, too! It costs money to make that stuff!” cry some business owners and corporate CEO’s.⁸

You know what? Tough. I’m 100% okay with stores having to spend a little extra money for additional, complementary signage, and they should be, too, for no reason other than it’s the right thing to do. It doesn’t take much to be inclusive. There’s nothing to lose by it and quite a lot to gain.

If you are offended by HH/SG, take some reflection time, figure out why, and then let it go. HH/SG is part of the solution, not part of the problem. You can be, too.

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, Happy Kwanzaa, and Season's Greetings! :-)

Thank you for reading.

~~~


Footnotes:

1.      HH feels more user-friendly to me than SG. It rolls off the tongue a little easier (it may be just the alliteration), but they both send the same basic message. However, if we analyze both a little further, ‘Season’s Greetings’ is technically MORE inclusive since it can be addressed to someone who does not believe in or observe traditional holidays.

2.      As with virtually every other person on the planet who uses written English, I constantly have to either pause to consider, or rewrite the contextually accurate version of ‘their’. Some time ago, I came across a meme that reads: “Theiyr’re. Problem solved.”

3.     Chiefly espoused by right-wing propaganda-media.

4.     I discuss this OL in more detail in another post (http://orkinlaw.blogspot.com/2019/11/orkins-law-of-premeditated-density.html)

5.     Premeditated Denseness is first cousin to a concept that has gotten WAY too much traction in our trouble times: ‘Willful Ignorance’, which is basically the act of intentionally avoiding information you find inconvenient or that could make you liable in a given situation.

6.     Just to demonstrate that I’m not entirely immune to this nonsense, I deliberated over whether I should write “during Christmas”, “during the month of December” or something else more specific than “during the holiday season”. Then I thought, “Screw it! I’m going with ‘holiday season!’

7.      History has emphatically and conclusively taught us that requiring Jews to wear emblems identifying them as Jews does NOT end well.

8.      Don’t get me started on corporate morality, or more specifically, the lack thereof.