Holidays vs. Christmas
Four years ago I wrote a post about how “Happy Holidays” has become the pervasive end-of-year phrase rather than “Merry Christmas”.
As I predicted a few years ago, the “Rockefeller Christmas Tree” has now become the “Tree at Rockefeller Center“. There is no mention of Christmas anywhere. It’s rather amusing to sift through the terminology used to avoid it, however (e.g. “Yule”, “Holidays”, “End of year”, “Season”, etc.)
Richmond Watch has an amusing article as to the ads that he/she has collected over the last little while and has noted which companies say “holidays” and which one says “Christmas”.
I think that Christians should be more concerned about the gross commercialization and paganization of their holiday – and that started a long time before certain people started pushing to stop using the word “Christmas”. If anything, shifting the public name to “holidays” or (less religiously) “season” helps Christians to retrench and re-establish a more meaningful celebration of the birth of their saviour within their own community … Why would those pushing the non-Christian line stop now when they can remove even the name from institutional memory?
Hmmmmmm… I always say Merry Christmas and so do others in return. If someone is of Jewish origin I say Happy Hanukkah during their festive season and similarly for those in the Sikh comunity… it’s Happy Diwali.
Perhaps this Ipsos poll is revealing: ;)
“A new Ipsos Reid poll released today and conducted on behalf of CanWest News Service and Global Television reveals that most (94%) Canadians celebrate Christmas.”
http://www.ipsos-na.com/news/pressrelease.cfm?id=3767
Well, if 94% of Canadians celebrate Christmas… the only rational greeting should be “Merry Christmas”!
PS. I didn’t know that you also ran this blog!
Interesting comments.
I find it interesting how almost anything has now become an excuse for commercialization – for example, the US Thanksgiving is larger than the last weekend before Christmas. Halloween I’ve noticed is becoming more commercialized. Is something like Easter (another Christian-origined holiday) next?
BJ – welcome! I tend to say “Happy everything” if the cultural makeup of the person I’m speaking to is ambiguous.