Happy Flipping Holidays

I should start by saying that I really don't care how you wish happiness upon me between Thanksgiving and January 10. Hanukkah, Quanza, Kwanzaa, Halloween (ok, so that one would get you a funny look at the least) or Christmas; it doesn't affect the quality of my holiday whether you choose something I "celebrate" or not.

In the last few years there's been extensive talk of a "war on Christmas". Specifically, the idea is that the use of the phrase "Happy Holidays" means that you hate xmas (and xmas is NOT x'ing Christ out of Christmas either; x = χριστος = greek for christ). Of course, talking heads like Bill O'Reilly have been blabbing about it, for a while now. Recently I've noticed friends on AIM with status messages deriding the phrase "Happy Holidays". I think I also recently heard the head elder at my home church talking about the "war on Christmas." This idea is weird to me. I, of course, grew up in the backwoods of TN. Of course, there was only Christianity back there as far as I knew and December only contained Christmas (none of those holidays from other religions). Nonetheless I wasn't taught to hate "Happy Holidays". I always grew up believing that Happy Holidays means "Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year; I'm just too lazy to say both of them." I actually do remember asking my mom what "Happy Holidays" means and her telling me that precisely (well the idea was the same). I've asked several of my friends (we'll say they represent millions of people) and they ALL said that until recently they just thought of "Happy Holidays" as "Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year". It wasn't until the last couple years that I (we) found that it suddenly means all that stuff plus, "ohh and I hate Christmas".

It seems those near to me have started to be swayed to the dark side as well. Over Christmas break when I was in FL, I found that even my dad and step-mom had gotten on the anti-Happy Holidays bandwagon. Now they're typically dyed in the wool liberals, but somehow they didn't get the memo that liberals are fine with the phrase "Happy Holidays". Well, that or they are free thinkers :), which is cool. In any case my dad suddenly got angry at the idea that we should say "Happy Holidays". Out of nowhere he said that people should just get over it if someone says "Merry Christmas" to them. I personally think it's just a stupid issue all together, even though I most likely wouldn't wish a Jew/Muslim/other a Merry Christmas (although I did recently ask a non-Christmas celebrating Christian how her Christmas was and she said she doesn't celebrate Christmas, although she went to Kentucky with a bunch of other people to NOT celebrate Christmas...whatever that means.) So I told him it really didn't bother me. Then he moved on to the other/related hot button issue. "And I think that people should be ok with the 10 commandments. I mean anyway, they are laws in America nonetheless."

This was interesting, because Aneta, Stefan and I were all there and we all see this issue pretty much eye to eye. So we basically all said, that there are really only two commandments that I would say are American laws: Don't kill, Don't steal. There's an argument that: don't commit adultery and don't lie are laws. The former really isn't enforced and the latter is only a law in very special cases. So I'd give it 20% are laws and at most 30%, which really isn't a good average to say that our laws are based on them.

It seems that this "Happy Holidays" has been given a different meaning over time, maybe by the pro-"Merry Christmas" crowd, maybe by the pro-"Include Everybody" crowd. In any case, it just seems silly to me to care. On the other hand, it really seems that people are stretching reality when it comes to the ten commandments. Don't get me wrong; I like to think that I'm a commandment keeping Christian and all. Just don't quite see why I should try to change history to support my views. Anyway, I'm done writing and I hope your holidays were unhappy.