It?s almost impossible to go to any retail establishment this year ? and in recent years ? without hearing “Happy Holidays!” or “You have a happy holiday!” at check-out from Thanksgiving through New Year?s Day.
Every catalog sports “holiday gift ideas,” and even Baltimore City?s buses say “Happy Holidays” on their electronic monitors. Other than the occasional menorah featured in a “holiday” catalog, most gifts advertised clearly belong under a tree and are dressed in red and green and silver and gold to match the colors of … Christmas.
Everyone knows what the phrase references. It?s no secret to shoppers or clerks why the vast majority of the population overextend their credit cards in November and December. It?s a fact that we spend millions on Christmas gifts each year. Many of those buying them may not practice Christianity or believe in its credos or those of any faith. But they exchange gifts today, on Christmas, not holiday day.
We apply specific names to holidays the rest of the year. Easter. Martin Luther King Day. Memorial Day. Veterans Day. Rosh Hashanah. Ramadan.
Why not Christmas? Saying “Merry Christmas” does not force the listener to celebrate Christ?s birth nor to believe in Christianity. It simply recognizes the day that Americans have celebrated throughout our country?s existence and that the vast majority still hold dear for spiritual reasons and as a day to share with loved ones.
To deny this is to deny our identity as individuals and as a nation in large part founded by people escaping religious persecution of their brand of Christianity.
Nowhere in the Constitution does it say being a nation of many faiths means denying the one most important to our history and the one which most informs our legal system.
And its hard to understand how masking Christmas promotes religious tolerance. Isn?t understanding a product of knowledge of one another?s faiths and practices? If anything, saying “Happy Holidays” obscures what each one of us believes, regardless of the faith we practice. It also drains the joy from the meaning of the day for those who do celebrate Christmas.
That hardly seems American ? or happy.
