Happy Holidays! This cheerful greeting seems to be causing quite a stir in recent years. For some reason, many of you out there seem to get all hot and bothered (and not in the good, I just accidentally rubbed up against Matthew McConaughey way) about people saying happy holidays instead of the less secular “Merry Christmas.” Why all the hostility over a chosen greeting? It’s not like people are saying “I Shit on Christmas!” Now there is even a Facebook group called something like “I say Merry Christmas, not Happy Holidays.” All the fuss kind of makes me want to ask, who the hell cares you self-obsessed little whiners?
I love Christmas, I was raised in a very happy and Christmas-centric household, but living in more diverse places taught me that not everyone celebrates the same way. Christmas is a Christian holiday at heart, but many of us choose to not celebrate that aspect of it and embrace the beauty and wonderment of sparkly decorations, holiday baking and excessively wrapped presents. It is the best of the consumer holidays and never fails to make me happy. Despite the religious overtones of many of the traditional Christmas carols I belt them out loud and proud, mainly because the irony of a drummer boy kickin’ it at the manger cracks me up.
Even with all my Christmas cheer (a perpetual joy I manage by being grumpy the other 11 months of the year to save it all up for the holidays) I recognize that others are still celebrating, though it may not be Christmas. Chanukah, Kwanzaa and whatever holidays celebrated by those other equally valid religions I don’t know anything about, all deserve a little cheer and acknowledgment too. So why not say Happy Holidays? It’s not a swipe at Jesus, it’s just an acceptance that we are different. If you cannot embrace tolerance at the holidays then when can you and for that matter, how good of a Christian can you possibly be? So many people have forgotten the true message behind Christianity: acceptance, tolerance, peace, blah, blah, blah.
The holidays are a time to be happy, enjoy family and friends, spend too much money on crap no one needs and eat excessive amounts of high-fat, calorically laden foods. If we cannot find it in our hearts to be tolerant of others at this time of year, then we might as well just give up all pretense and start beating the crap out of everyone who does not think like us. My policy is and has been for a long time, to say Merry Christmas back to those who say it to me first and Happy Holidays in all other instances, unless I know you’re Jewish in which case I will say Happy Chanukah. What can I say, I just want everyone to be happy. I’m a giver like that.
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