Seasons Such As These

Now I'm a bit late getting to this, but it's worth pointing out, even as the Merry Christmas vs. Happy Holidays "controversy" fades away into dormancy until the theocons start whining again, that the entire narrative of "Christmas under attack from secularist forces"---all of it---was a not too elaborate hoax.

Two days before the anniversary of ODSB (Our Dear Savior's Birth, for those not paying attention), Kevin Drum pointed out that

Over at CJR Daily, Paul McLeary cuts through the "war on Christmas" nonsense and gets at the truth:

But wade through the wall-to-wall coverage of the story, and it becomes apparent that there are only a handful of examples -- three, to be exact -- being recycled in article after article. Many of these pieces use the same incidents in almost the same way. Some even hit for the cycle, as USA Today did today, referencing all three stories in one shot.

And there's more! It turns out that one of these three stories is completely untrue and a second one is pretty much untrue. Tell me again about how Christmas is under siege, will you?

Somebody clearly needs to inform whomever is responsible for this ridiculous website that they've been mislead. (If that didn't get your attention, bear in mind that the site's title caption is "***Make a Difference in America...Save Merry Christmas!***") Particularly amusing is the fixation on the supposed anti-Christmas sentiments of Macy's. This was the Macy's home page the day after Christmas. It included a helpful reminder that there are "only 364 days until next Christmas." For me, as we've discussed, that's too few days, but dare I say it might count as exculpatory evidence against the charge that Macy's is waging a campaign of "advertising and decorations...extremely offensive to the culture and tradition of Americans who honor and celebrate Christmas."

Apropos of the denigration of Christmas, which I don't think too many people (who are not me) are actively engaged in, it's worth asking just what's so terrible and "offensive" about a corporation, should it exist, that asks its employees to wish customers "Happy Holidays." Assuming that customers are to be wished a happy anything, what is it about the phrase "Happy Holidays" that seems to get so many pairs of panties in a bunch? Admittedly I'm no Christian theologian, but I can't for the life of me see how such a greeting conflicts at all with the celebration of Christmas. One way to interpret it would be as an offering of good will for both Christmas and New Year's---and Christians aren't exactly "extremely offended" by being told to have a Happy New Year (are they?). If one must indulge in the custom of mutual injunctions to happiness, what's so bad about wishing that a stranger have "Happy Holidays," rather than a "Merry Christmas," just on the off-chance, long as it might be, that one's interlocutor does not celebrate Christmas? I suppose there might be a fringe of the Christian community that actually is "extremely offended" by any holiday greeting that doesn't explicitly acknowledge the occasion of ODSB (as opposed to striking poses of extreme unction), but let us call such people by their right name: fundamentalists. Must they be catered to? I think not. Among the huge mainstream of Christians who understand that "Happy Holidays" and "Merry Christmas" are compatible messages, what reason could there be for such hostility to the idea of offering a more neutral greeting.

Virginia Postrel pretty much nailed the various reasons for insisting on telling strangers to have a "Merry Christmas":

When you extend these greetings, are you wishing people happiness? Or affirming your Christianity? Do you want people who don't celebrate Christmas to be happy (or merry)? Or do you want to make them at least mildly uncomfortable? The answers will determine what you say.

She doesn't go on to say, though she could have, that reflecting on this quadrangle of motivations behind "Merry Christmas" ought to be an edifying experience. If the idea is to wish people happiness, then Christmas need not have anything to do with it. "Happy Holidays" conveys just as much along these lines. If the idea is to affirm Christianity, then there is a place for it, and it's called church. If you want people who don't celebrate Christmas to be happy, then the appropriate thing to do (clearly) would be to offer them a word about their own particular festival (or, again, "Happy Holidays" would do just fine). If the idea, at last, is to discomfort non-believers, then by all means, continue telling perfect strangers about ODSB, but don't act surprised when they do the American thing and tell you to fuck off.

Contrary to some rumors, by the way, Christianity is not the American thing. And yes, it does appear that Bill O'Reilly is the love child of Roy Cohn and Father Coughlin.

Finally, I have to call shenaningans on James Lileks' ongoing adventures in pseudo-sociology, over the course of which he thinks he has captured a particular trend of store clerks reacting oddly whenever he informs them that they ought to have a Merry Christmas. By way of defending himself from an attack by James Wolcott, Lileks makes it clear what the evidentiary basis of his hypothesis really is: "[His] first-hand observations in Minnesota shopping malls." Well good. The point of Wolcott's that Lileks hoped to parry was that he, Lileks, had not exactly discovered a real trend. Thus Lileks hopes to have it both ways. Either the trend is proposed as one with some scope beyond Lileks' own personal Cartesian theater---in which case the fact that godless Manhattanites are still saying "Merry Christmas" does register as counterevidence---or it does not. In the latter case, why would Lileks have raised the issue in the first place? Shenanigans, first of all, to Lileks' defense of his slovenly substitution of anecdote for evidence.

Shenaningans secondly to the underlying point. Lileks proves that he really doesn't get it when he diagnoses the reasons that someone might react unlike a Dickensian peasant to being wished a "Merry Christmas":

What amuses me, if that’s the term, is the way retailers and large media have shied away from saying “Merry Christmas” because it might offend the prissy little busybodies who spend their life like a dental filling in a tinfoil blizzard.

There are two separate issues here, which Lileks, true to form, confuses unmercilessly. The first is the establishment of a corporate policy of using the phrase "Happy Holidays," which we've already talked about at some length, and which has exactly nothing to do with the spontaneous awkwardness Lileks seems to have instigated by letting clerks know that Christmas is a time at which to be merry. Virginia Postrel, being way too nice, writes on the subject of Lileks' cognitive dissonance that "I wish good-hearted folks like Lileks would consider that Christmas greetings don't make everyone feel good." Indeed. Just how many times has Lileks said "Merry Christmas" to a clerk in a Minnesota mall who then made some face or gesture that was actually indicative of discomfort at the phrase? A hundred? Or two? And if, as I suspect, this has happened at most a handful of times, could it be possible that the clerks thusly addressed were Jewish, or heathens of some other variety. Surely, no one could be made genuinely uncomfortable be being told to have a "Merry Christmas," right? ("I'm a Jew. A lonely Jew. I'd be merry, but I'm Hebrew. On Christmas.")