Miss Manners got the Inevitable Seasonal Question the other day.
Back in the day, I clearly recall people wishing each other “Happy Holidays” in Christmas cards and in store ads and just about everything and no one, not even my folks turned a hair. Of course, back then, people were mostly referring to the whole Christian holiday season, starting with Christmas Day and ending no earlier than the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6.
They were not trying to be inclusive of anything, because back then about a zillion percent of the country was, in fact, celebrating Christmas and so why the heck do you even have to think about anything else? I’m pretty sure that we had neighbors living in our little suburb of Philadelphia who thought Ramadan was that appetizer with bacon and water chestnuts.
But it’s a different day now, and the demographics of this country are shootin’ around like fireworks. And every faith and culture seems to have a religious observance that involves gift giving, fruitcake, too much chocolate and getting guilted into spending the day with the brother you’re not speaking to. And retailers, bless their hearts want to recognize that. They want the Hanukkah spenders, and the Kwanzaa spenders, and the Druids with their golden sickles.
So we’ve had an idea, here in the Interrupted Household, designed to pacify the Christmasers and make retailers happy. Here’s the deal: if you were at the United Nations, and the ambassador from Mexico walked past you and said, “Hola!” you would know that she was saying “Hello!” And same for the ambassador from Germany who says “Guten Tag!” And no one would get pissed off. Yes, it would be marvy if you knew that the person next to you spoke Swedish and said, “Hejsan!” but no one would expect you to be a mind reader and know that he was really Finnish.
So, let’s change the etiquette zeitgeist to be that, when you wish to send your holiday greetings, you send the greetings in your particular ‘language’ of the holidays. So, if you observe Christmas, tell *everyone* “Merry Christmas” and they’ll know to ‘translate’ it into their particular holiday wish, as they would know your general intent. It would then become the height of rudeness to yell at someone for not somehow intuiting that you only celebrate the winter solstice, or that maybe you observe three different holidays in your blended household.
So, with that in mind, I wish you a Merry, Merry, Interrupted Christmas. May your chocolate-covered pretzels be many and your fruitcakes few!
******************************************************************************************
By the way, I think that the rabid Christmasers are, in part, reflecting their fear of that demographic change. I think it frightens them to see an old way of doing things change, and that there’s going to be a federal holiday for Dawli coming up in the next decade. I get that they perceive that they’re members of a group that has sucked up all the attention and advertising space and funding simply through an exercise in sheer numbers, much the way my husband gets all the bed covers because he outweighs me, and that they, the marginalizers, may be come the marginalized and pushed to the side of the bed.
But bitching at Wal-mart cashiers isn’t going to fix that.
Mom, Interrupted 
Okay so I know I’m not one of the rabid Christmasers that you speak of when you say “By the way, I think that the rabid Christmasers are, in part, reflecting their fear of that demographic change.”…. but as a mild Chirstmaser I will say that one of the things that bugs me about “Happy Holidays” was in 2008 (or was it 2007) when ALL the stores seemed to move to generic Happy Holidays and even the Rockefeller tree was called a Holiday Tree (it doesn’t seem as bad this year but one of those years it was just obnoxious) is that instead of being inclusive the term “Holiday” came across as being specifically exclusive of Christmas.
Personally I love walking in a store and seeing all the various Holidays celebrated and I think it would be cool to have a large Menorah on display as well at Rockefeller Center. (Although for all I know they do… I’ve only been to NYC once and it wasn’t during the Holiday season).
Here’s more of where I’m coming from. It seems I heard somewhere once that many of the Christian holidays were created (or however you want to phrase that) to overshadow Pagan holidays (see http://christianity.about.com/od/christmas/f/christmashistor.htm for the Christmas/Pagan holiday connection). I think that thought in my head got me to thinking about the commercialization of holidays. I can’t help but wonder if the commercialization of Christmas and Easter is a way to diminish the religious aspects of those days. Whereas holidays such as Labor Day and Thanksgiving have very little religious connections and they haven’t really been commercialized.
Although now that I say that I do wonder was I excited to see chocolate menorahs and dreidels at CVS because it was inclusive for the Jewish kids or because it meant Chanukah was getting commercialized too… I really like to think it was excitement for the kids.
What’s funny to me is that marketing and advertising has made the world go round, even so far back as the inception of Christianity.
So, the Catholic church wants to promote their new-fangled religion, so they cheerfully co-opt existing pagan holidays to make it easier for everyone to get confused and start celebrating Christmas instead of Winter Solstice. That’s classic bait and switch. (And I say that, as you know, as an observant Catholic. It’s fine with me!)
Marketing and greed are driving the commercialization of Christmas on all fronts, and I think that Fox and their “War on Christmas” is misguided. If gift giving weren’t associated with it already, Hallmark would have dreamed it up. I think that Labor Day and Thanksgiving have missed out only because there is no easy way to give gifts around them. Though it isn’t for lack of trying. Thanksgiving cards are promoted, as are greeting cards for almost every occasion under the sun.
So I don’t think it’s a planned thing, as part of some master plot. For one thing, I don’t think anyone or any entity is that organized. I think that some marketing whiz kids recognized the data that said that something like 40% of people in this country do not label themselves as having any organized religion at all, and decided that calling Christmas trees “Holiday trees” was the way to go and it backfired.
So, in your Chanukah example, it really is the kids’ excitement that’s driving the commercialization, which will cheapen it for some. Because greed has a way of doing that to everything.
But I think we will see evolution of the holiday over time. It makes sense: entropy is everywhere. But as long as I’m celebrating Christmas the way I see fit, it doesn’t bother me that anyone else is or isn’t.
Thank you for taking the time to comment!