No offense intended by the headline. I hope no offense taken. It's not as if I said, "play in traffic," or, "you remind me of Yoko Ono." But some people take "Merry Christmas" as an insult. The phrase doesn't pass their lips, and it irritates upon entering their ears.

Instead of "Merry Christmas," Scrooges insist on "Happy Holidays." It's supposedly more inclusive. But what's a "holiday"? It's a compound word for holy day. So even this phrase, supposedly inoccuous, excludes atheists and agnostics. And to what holiday does the phrase "Happy Holidays" refer? Christmas, of course. Christianity claims greater than three of four Americans. If Christmas were in, say, July, do you think anyone would be saying "Happy Holidays" in December? In this sense, "holidays," like x-mas, is a euphemism for Christmas. Let's stop being lame. Say it. Just say it: Christmas. Holiday Christmas card. Winter Christmas break. Seasonal Christmas tree.

"Happy Holidays" also distorts the importance of the holidays of non-Christian traditions. To a thinking non-Christian, "Happy Holidays" is more insidious than "Merry Christmas" because it Christianizes non-Christian holidays. Because of its nearness to Christmas, Hanukkah becomes in the collective mind the Jewish Christmas. But it's not as important to the Jewish tradition as Christmas is to the Christian tradition. It just appears close to Christmas on the calendar, which sparks the false equation among people ignorant of other faiths. Christmas, with the collusion of Hallmark, President Bush, and the U.S. Postal Service, gives the Islamic Eid holidays a promotion too. At least Eid and Hanukkah are legit holidays. Some guy just made up Kwanzaa. Fortunately for those who celebrate it, the guy had the foresight of placing Kwanzaa in proximity to Christmas. So Kwanzaa, like Christmas, gets its own stamp, presidential proclamation, and greeting cards.

Substituting "Happy Holidays" for "Merry Christmas" is similar to the academic movement to replace BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini) with BCE (Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era). What separates BCE from CE? The same thing that separates BC from AD: Jesus Christ. Even when trying to hide Christ under the bed, he still pops his head up.

Christmas is a time for peace on earth and goodwill toward men. Just as there's no need to take offense at hearing "Merry Christmas," there's no need to intend offense at saying "Merry Christmas." Why wish a spinster "Happy Valentine's Day"? Christmas is a religious rather than a political season. But not for those whose politics are their religion. They'll have it no other way.

Each year my family gets "Christmas Cards". My family enjoys them and I look forward to them. I like to have fun with them. I make two piles. The happy holiday amd seasons greetings go in one pile; the Merry Christmas amd Holy day ones go in the other. I take note. The next year the later enjoy fruitful gifts and praise while the former get a crap gift, an ultra religios card and great scrutiny of their place in my life. It seems to work. Merry Christmas seems to be making a comeback.

Happy Nondenominational Days and bah humbug!

Personally, even as an agnostic, I have never had any problem with Christmas. I have celebrated it every year of my life and, even if I don't subscribe to its religious basis, I can still celebrate it as a secular holiday, which some might argue it's become, anyway. In either case, I don't begrudge Christians the celebration of their savior's birth and I support their right, as my fellow Americans, to observe their religious rites and to use whatever religious symbols they choose to use or display, wherever they choose to use or display them. This is America, the land of the free, not America, the land of the Left.

Gary

Oh, yeah; and Merry Christmas to all!

none of my jewish or even waspier friends seem to take offense when their wished a "Happy St. Patrick's Day" . . .

my bad . . . when "they're" wished, not "their"

Best post on the verbal grinches and Christmas I've read. Much better than Bill O's talking points.

Dan, Merry Christmas to you and yours. May the New Year find you healthier and more prosperous than this year. May you also finish your next book.

I get your point about Kwanzaa, but in a very real sense all holidays are made up. They didn't spring into being spontaneously. Christians even dispute the date of Christmas, January 6 for the Orthodox churches, December 25 for the Western churches.

Does the watering down of “Christmas” smack of multiculturalism to anyone else?

It always humors me to hear fellow blacks rhapsodize about "my African heritage," as if I have more in common with Africa than I do America, or that I should want to have much in common with people in a backwards, poverty-stricken, disease-riddled, Third World culture. What African traditions do I enjoy? Cannibalism? Tribal dances? Queer facial piercing? Clitorectomies? Dying of AIDS? Kwanza? Oh, wait. That’s an American tradition, even though some people think it’s an African one. I prefer Christmas over Kwanza, just as I prefer the United States over Nigeria or Somalia. American traditions are better than African traditions and fake African traditions. Dan’s right. All cultures are not created equal. The grass is greener on our side because we have better fertilizer: beliefs, behaviors, values, religion, etc. Some soils help a society grow - others just soil it. With multiculturalism, manure masquerades as mulch. Defecating on a society does not help it grow. Holiday trees? Winter break? Kwanza? Talk about "crap gifts!"

Herman, as I recall, from my first exposure to Kwanza in the early seventies, it seemed the hippie movement, the Black Panthers and everyone else on the left wanted to attach themselves to Kwanza and the black movement toward interest in African heritage. I don't know how old you are or if you would remember that era or not, but that's the way I recall it, anyway. What's your take on the origins of Kwanza?

I was born in 1985, nearly two decades after the first Kwanza celebration. My take on Kwanza echoes my takes on Chinese New Year, Cinco de Mayo and Ramadan: I do not celebrate foreign holidays. Why should I honor and acknowledge traditions from a heritage that is not my own? Besides genetics and the color of my skin, what did I inherit from my great, great, great, great grandparents? Who cares? Next to my American heritage, my supposed African heritage is chopped liver. My true ancestors are not in my family tree. The inheritance I enjoy transcends race. Freedom, the pursuit of happiness and the knowledge that I can do anything I set my mind to are real cultural values worth celebrating on... on Christmas and every other day of the year.

No harm in exploring one's heritage, if that's what one is interested in, of course.

Genetically speaking, we only inherit very little from even a grandparents, and nothing from our g-g-g-g-grandparents. Given that, you'd have no genetic material from your African ancestors at all. I should know; I have been doing genealogy for over twenty years and genetic genealogy since 2002. I founded a DNA surname project that year.

"Freedom, the pursuit of happiness and the knowledge that I can do anything I set my mind to are real cultural values worth celebrating on... on Christmas and every other day of the year."

Yeah, I agree. Merry Christmas.

Interesting point on the genetics thing.

Ditto the Merry Christmas.

Um, Dan? Your blog rocks.

Here's Charles Dickens's Christmas Carol
... as a postmodernist literature professor would teach it:

"Happy Holidays, every person!"
- Physically- and Vertically-Challenged Tim

Hey, each to their own. You either believe or don’t believe and just enjoy or you don't. But, when did the majority become the minority when it comes to being the deciding vote on things?

When 98 people say something is a go and a 2 say it shouldn't be, how does the 2 win the argument?

Imagine kids in my town who are by majority into the Christmas season having a pageant at the local middle school and two sets of parents don't like the religious connotation of "Christmas".

So, tonight, the "Christmas Pageant" will be known as a "Winter Pageant", the "Christmas Tree" will be known as the "Miracle Tree", "Holy Night" will be sung as "Frosty Night" and the secularization of all things spiritual continues with the support from people who can not just live and let live.

Merry Winter and pass the ammunition.

"...when did the majority become the minority when it comes to being the deciding vote on things?"

I think we can blame the ACLU for that. They've been using the courts and activist judges to make an endrun around the Constitution and the electorate for decades. But, what should wqe expect from an organzation whose founder, Roger Baldwin says:

"I am for socialism, disarmament, and ultimately for abolishing the state itself as an instrument of violence and compulsion. I seek social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class, and sole control by those who produce wealth. Communism is the goal."
(from "The ACLU vs. America," by Alan Sears and Craig Osten)

Jesus is a Capricorn. That's scary.

Gary, Kwanzaa is a "holiday" invented by one "Dr." Maulana Karenga (real name Ron N. Everett) "Karenga" was convicted of two counts of felonious assault and one count of false imprisonment in 1971, but only served four years of a one-to-ten sentence. Prior to his incarceration, he had been an avowed Black Nationalists, but after his release, he remade himself as Maulana Ron Karenga, went into academics, and by 1979 was running the Black Studies Department at California State University in Long Beach and converted to Marxism. Kwanzaa is Karenga's attempt to "de-white" (the words of the "Reverend" Al Sharpton, and in the process, de-Christianize Christmas.

Everett claimed Kwanzaa was an African harvest festival, when in fact no such celebration ever existed in Africa. It is based on seven principles, which include collective work and cooperative economics; sound vaguely familiar? I think the Pilgrims tried this once, but it didn't work!

Merry Christmas!

Thanks, Thom. I had heard this from an anti-Kwanza black intellectual on Fox News Channel, just last week, but, when I attempted to find anything on Kwanza's true origins online, I found mostly pro-Kwanza propaganda, instead.

True, about the pilgrims. Their brief flirtation with communism almost cost them their lives (from starvation), not to mention the start of the greatest nation on earth.

Merry Christmas and Happy Hannukah!

Gary, you're very welcome. And God bless us, everyone!

I'm hours late by now, but I wanted to wish the Flynn family, as well as the readers and commenters at this weblog, a very Merry Christmas, and best wishes for a Happy New Year as well. God Bless!!

Gary, you are correct and can anybody doubt that organizations like the ACLU are out to corrupt and destroy this country? As Dr. Savage says, the enemy within.

Have you checked the RNC web site recently? Even the RNC hates Christmas! Why is there a war on Christmas? Maybe because there isn't one, dumbasses! Christmas is made-up religious observance having no basis in fact. Only gasbags of like O'Rielly and Limbaugh would continue to push this non-issue and you right-wing nutbars take up the chant. Happy Holidays!

Now wouldn't you expect that a poster known as "GaLiberal" would finish with Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas. Inhaler.

Wow man, cheap drugs. Far out.

Funny how so many of you dumbasses blame the ACLU for your preceived woes. Like little children you stomp your feet and throw your verbal hissy fits when someone dares point out how you're totally fu@ked up. There is not war on the fake religious observance called Christmas and the ACLU is only protecting the rights of the minority. I thank the ACLU for preventing narrow-minded jerkoffs like you people from forcing your so-called religion down my throat at every opportunity. Call it what you want, but a society free from religious oppression thrives while a society burdened with little Hitlers like Bush and his buddies will degenerate into chaos. Have your shitty religion all dressed up with trappings; your are still just a bunch of ignorant fools.

There's only on thing that anybody is trying to stick down your throat oh deranged one.