Happy Holidays!<\/p>\n
What? You think I\u2019m jumping the gun by just a few months? Then, obviously, you\u2019re not looking at a calendar. Rosh Hashanah begins on September 12th at sundown, and both Yom Kippur and Ramadan start on September 21st. And, apparently, Japan celebrates Respect for the Aged Day on September 17th.<\/p>\n
Yet \u201cHappy Holidays\u201d is an unnecessary euphemism in September, because if you want to wish someone a Happy Respect for the Aged Day, you don\u2019t have to do it in code words. You can actually mention the holiday in your greeting without fear of reprisal. Same with \u201cHappy Halloween\u201d or \u201cHappy Thanksgiving\u201d or \u201cHappy Valentine\u2019s Day.\u201d<\/p>\n
Can you see where I\u2019m going with this?<\/p>\n
The reason I really hate the expression \u201cHappy Holidays\u201d is that it turns \u201cMerry Christmas\u201d into a political statement. \u201cMerry Christmas\u201d no longer just means \u201cI hope your Christmas is a merry one.\u201d It now also means \u201cSCREW the P.C. police! I\u2019ll wish you a Merry Christmas if I damn well want to! The A.C.L.U. can\u2019t tell me what to do!!\u201d<\/p>\n
Christmas shouldn\u2019t be a time to pick a fight. It should be Christmastime \u2013 not \u201cwinter break\u201d or \u201cthe holiday season.\u201d And \u201cMerry Christmas\u201d should mean just what it says. I\u2019m not sure how we can get back to that.<\/p>\n
\u201cHappy Holidays\u201d defenders insist that they\u2019re more tolerant and kind, because their greeting is more inclusive. Except that it isn\u2019t. Polls show that over 95% of Americans celebrate Christmas. You\u2019d be hard-pressed to say the same thing about, say, Halloween or Valentine\u2019s Day, yet no one has to vaguely acknowledge a \u201choliday\u201d in order to avoid giving offense to the fundamentalists who think October 31 is the day children dress up to unwittingly worship Satan.<\/p>\n
Ah, say the H.H. Defenders, but there are more holidays being celebrated than Christmas in December! What about Hanukkah? Or Kwanzaa? Huh? HUH?!!<\/p>\n
What about them? If you want to wish me a Happy Hanukkah, do it! I would certainly appreciate the sentiment. And, believe it or not, I\u2019ve been wished Happy Hanukkah a number of times in my life, because I grew up in a Southern California neighborhood that was predominantly Jewish. We used to get Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah off from school. It was great \u2013 we usually went to Disneyland on Yom Kippur. And I was always jealous of my friends who got to eat their peanut butter sandwiches on Motzah during Passover. (Not sure why, though. Motzah tastes like cardboard.)<\/p>\n
We sang Hanukkah songs in my fifth grade chorus. And not just namby-pamby songs about dreidels and such. I still remember one song with a haunting, strange Hebrew melody:<\/p>\n
May your days and nights
\nBe a feast of lights
\nThe eternal flame, may it glow in you
\nAnd the Holy One, may He know in you
\nOnly love<\/p><\/blockquote>\nThe song started with talk of \u201cmama lighting the Menorah\u201d and \u201cPapa reading from the Torah.\u201d And I, a good little Mormon boy, sang along cheerfully without even considering a lawsuit! I even had a solo during the song \u201cEight Bright Candles of Hanukkah.\u201d How cool was that? I\u2019m very grateful that I was raised to appreciate a religious culture different from my own.<\/p>\n
And, by the way, Hanukkah is a relatively minor Jewish holiday \u2013 essentially the celebration of a military victory. The real holidays \u2013 the High Holy Days – take place this month, and nobody makes any ballyhoo over them in the culture at large. Hanukkah\u2019s secular importance has exploded in order to compete with Christmas, and many of my Jewish friends celebrated both, so as not to miss out on Santa\u2019s loot.<\/p>\n
Once upon a time, when you said \u201cMerry Christmas\u201d to a Jew, they took it as a message saying \u201cI hope your December 25th is a merry day,\u201d not \u201cConvert to Christianity or burn in hell, heathen!\u201d Actually, I think you\u2019d be hard-pressed to find a Jew \u2013 or anyone of any other religion \u2013 who would take offense at being wished a Merry Christmas. Except Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses, but they hate everything holidayish.<\/p>\n
And then there\u2019s the Kwanzaa people.<\/p>\n
Kwanzaa sucks. I have no patience for Kwanzaa. It has no religious significance or history. It was created forty years ago by someone trying to stick it to Christmas – a Bizarro Christmas for Atheists. Why should I have an ounce of respect for a holiday that was created in anger to stir up the kind of P.C. resentment to even the mere mention of Christmas that we see today?<\/p>\n
Yet here\u2019s the rub: if you wish me a Happy Kwanzaa, I\u2019ll take it in stride! It will make me smile! Because at least Happy Kwanzaa doesn\u2019t devalue the very existence of Christmas the way \u201cHappy Holidays\u201d does.<\/p>\n
Some see my attitude as unnecessarily belligerent. As columnist Anna Quindlen wrote last year:<\/a><\/p>\n
It is surprising to discover that some believe the enduring power of the story of the child born in Bethlehem to be so shaky that it must be shored up by plastic creches in town squares and middle-school concerts. Apparently, conservative critics are also exercised by the fact that various discount stores have failed to pay homage to the baby in the manger, in their advertisements, their labeling and even their in-store greetings.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
She gets it exactly wrong. It\u2019s not that my faith depends on seeing the baby Jesus in Wal-Mart ads. It’s that she’s so skittish about Christian intolerance that she won’t even allow us to mention Christmas by name. Is it too much to ask for some direct reference to the holiday I\u2019m supposed to be happy about? I\u2019m tired of having to pretend that Christmas doesn\u2019t matter as much as it so clearly does. I am disgusted with Christmas TV ads filled with Santa Claus and Christmas trees that end with \u201cHappy Holidays\u201d because mentioning the word \u201cChristmas\u201d might offend Anna Quindlen.<\/p>\n
When people say \u201cHappy Holidays,\u201d they\u2019re not being inclusive. They\u2019re running scared. They mean \u201cMerry Christmas,\u201d but they\u2019re afraid of looking intolerant by actually saying it.<\/p>\n
So where does that leave me?<\/p>\n
Grumpy? Intolerant? Embittered? Not really. I still love Christmas and everything about it. when someone wishes me Happy Holidays, I smile, wish them a Merry Christmas, and hope the politics don\u2019t get in the way.<\/p>\n
In the meantime, Happy Respect for the Aged Day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"HappyHolidays!What? You think I\u2019m jumping the gun by just a few months? Then, obviously, you\u2019re not looking at a calendar. Rosh Hashanah begins on September 12th at sundown, and both Yom Kippur and Ramadan start on September 21st. And, apparently, Japan celebrates Respect for the Aged Day on September 17th.Yet \u201cHappy Holidays\u201d is an unnecessary ... Read more<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-495","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/495","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=495"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/495\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}