Christmas, Hanukkah, and the Whole Shebang

[YoungDemocrat]

A lot of very angry things have been said about the Merry Christmas/Season's Greetings/Happy Holidays business, also a lot of funny things but you'll forgive me for sticking to the angry. There are apparently two sides to this non-issue and both are pretty extreme. There's the bible-thumping right wingers with righteous anger leaking from every pore and insist that quoting scripture and saying Merry Christmas is not enough and that storefronts should be stocked with holy water attached to a string that gives people entering suprise baptismals. On the other side we see the shrill hyper-secularists who are certainly misrepresented by the right-wingers but whom I find fault with nonetheless. I say "apparently" because I think that most people, the reasonable ones on both sides of the aisle who don't get to speak out much because they aren't quite partisan enough. The words, "Merry Christmas" and "Happy Holidays" are not tools of conversion and I hope that any person with faith is strong enough to not have it changed by two words. "Oh! Merry Christmas? I'd never thought of it like that before, maybe Judaism isn't so hot after all, tell you what, I'm ditching this menorah." Nah, doesn't happen like that. In short, Christians saying Merry Christmas are wishing for you to be happy with the holiday season and could care less if you were Christian (for the most part) and people wishing "Happy Holidays" aren't slamming Christ or trying to burn down your church they are wishing for you to be happy with the holiday season.

[unblock]

1. at least in manhattan, saying "merry christmas" IS promoting christianity

i'm a jew, but i grew up in a VERY waspy town in the midwest. there, people said "merry christmas" and i agree, they just meant good wishes. they quite reasonably assumed that everyone celebrated christmas, because about 99.7% of the town DID celebrate christmas.

but in manhattan, where i now work, everyone knows there are a lot of jews and other non-christians here, and everyone here knows that saying "merry christmas", unless you KNOW your audience to be christian, is most definitely a pointed remark designed to put peer pressure/intimidation on your potentially non-christian audience to make them feel that "normal" people celebrate christmas.

this is obviously all the more so when the person saying "merry christmas" KNOW their audience to be jewish. then it's just outright obnoxious.

(my personal views, ignore the fact that i'm a moderator)

[YoungDemocrat]

2. I concur

When you say it to someone you know to be Jewish, it does sometimes take on a sinister connotation and you know better than me what living in Manhattan is like. I don't like it when people to that, frankly, and though I'm sure most people are thick-skinned enough to stand up to it it's a pressure that people don't need. However, raising a fuss to the orator will do little to advance a cause, if people get in trouble for saying Merry Christmas, they'll find another way to be intolerant and that's why I think it should lie because people get riled up when they shouldn't and when you get riled up when you SHOULD, there's always some petty revenge taken.