Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays

Every year at this time there are discussions and some controversy over saying “Merry Christmas” versus saying “Happy Holidays”. (I’m a Merry Christmas guy, but the other is fine too. Both are nice sentiments. That is not the case with retailers who talk of “holiday gifts” when they mean “Christmas presents”.  That’s phony and deserves disapproval  just like any other phoniness.  Any retail executive whose company’s ads blather about holiday gifts  deserves to have his bonus reduced  to reflect only profits due to sales of Kwanzaa gifts.)  Religious people have observed correctly that leftists created the controversy by making saying “Merry Christmas”  at least somewhat taboo under the canons of political correctness.  They often attribute this to the leftists’ disapproval  or even hatred of Christianity.  There is something to that, but I do not think it is the main reason many on the left have a problem with Christmas.  Christmas is as much a secular holiday as a religious one. Millions of people around the world who are not Christians enjoy the Christmas season and take part in its festivities.  Christmas trees, Santa, Frosty the Snowman, presents, Yule logs, long cherished Christmas movies, and Rudolph have little or nothing to do with Christianity.   Easter is a far more Christian holiday than Christmas, and the leftists seem to leave it alone.  

(The leftists’ stated  reason that saying Merry Christmas might offend  people who do not celebrate Christmas or leave out people who celebrate other holidays at the same time of the year is not to be taken seriously because it is not applied anywhere else. For example one can imagine how people making that argument  would react to a similar claim that Martin Luther King Day  should be referred to as the January Holiday to avoid offending those who instead celebrate Elvis’s birthday or Confederate Heroes Day.)

I think the leftists' real objection is more to the “Merry” than to the “Christmas” in its religious sense.  The Christmas season is one of  people freely and  on their own having fun, appreciating family and friends, feeling and acting benevolently, and  generally experiencing joy in their lives all without any direction or supervision from their self-proclaimed betters and would be rulers. Many leftists are puritans in Mencken’s sense of the term. They also have abiding distaste for this country and most of its people.  The idea of millions of people going around so obviously feeling good and being happy and generally satisfied with themselves and their lives would naturally be hard for them to stomach.

So Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.