The War on Happy Holidays

December 19, 2007

It happened again earlier this week: I was talking to someone I didn't know well and, in a friendly way, ended the conversation with "have a wonderful holiday!" After all, I didn't know anything about her religious beliefs--she could have just finished celebrating Hanukkah last week, or she could be preparing for Eid al-Adha tomorrow. Or she could be really confused and celebrating Diwali six weeks late. There's nothing wrong with "merry Christmas"--I say it myself about half the time--but in this religiously diverse culture, I sometimes feel like wishing people a happy holiday. It covers all the bases.

But I live in Mississippi, the closest thing the Southern Baptist Convention has to its very own Vatican City, so I've come to realize that the inclusiveness of all-inclusive greetings comes across to some people as insipid and overtly secular. And indeed she did look shocked for a moment. She frowned, averted her eyes, and muttered "merry Christmas!" as she abruptly turned and began to walk away.

Bill O'Reilly, of FOX News' The O'Reilly Factor, isn't as bad as his PR would suggest. But he doesn't care for people like me who go around talking about our annual winter "holidays" as if there were more than one. "(T)he Christmas controversy ... has become the centerpiece," he wrote in a 2005 article, of "the culture war between traditional Americans and secular progressives"--a culture war that, second only to national counterterrorism efforts, is "the most important thing happening in the country today." So for those of you watching at home: curing cancer, addressing global poverty and racism, improving our system of public education...all such matters are second to the culture war, whatever that is.

Not that I can't understand why conservative Christians might find the "happy holidays" trend irritating. In a single generation--okay, we'll be generous and say two generations--the U.S. government has put an end to government-mandated prayer in public schools, government-mandated Bible classes, and government-mandated nativity scenes. And now Wal-Mart greeters sometimes say happy holidays instead of merry Christmas.

"Merry Christmas" is important precisely because you might be saying it to a nonbeliever. In most contexts it makes you look like something of a nut to walk up to random strangers and say "He is risen indeed!" or "Trust in the Lord!," but "merry Christmas" is innocent enough. Yet it carries with it the implicit message that about two millennia ago, you think something miraculous happened--or at least don't mind observing a holiday celebrating that miracle, whether you believe it actually happened or not. (How many people really believe it took place on December 25th, the date of the traditional Saturnalia festival?)

And maybe some of us so-called secular progressives have become a little intolerant of Christian proclamations of faith. It's easy to understand why the government shouldn't shell out taxpayers' money to for example, to say that on the third day Jesus rose again to judge the living and the dead, but to ostracize individuals who say that sort of thing is to practice religious bigotry. There's not really another name for it. Of course "merry Christmas" should be socially acceptable.

But if it is--and this is the part that, I think, gets Bill O'Reilly's hackles up--then "Eid mubarak!" and "happy Hanukkah!" should also be socially acceptable. If religious bigotry against Christians is wrong, then it's reasonable to ask why religious bigotry against non-Christians is not also wrong. This seems to be a sticking point in American culture; one 2003 CNN/Gallup poll, for example, found that only 29 percent of respondents objected to placing the Ten Commandments in government buildings, while 64 percent objected to doing the same with verses from the Qur'an. Numbers like those suggest that we should be more concerned about respect for Ramadan than respect for Christmas, but don't tell Bill O'Reilly. After all, it's probably safe to assume that Muslims aren't the people he had in mind when he spoke of "traditional Americans," even though American Muslims are by and large better at observing their traditions than American Christians.

And what's all this business about "war," anyway? If I say "happy holidays," or even "happy Solstice," am I really declaring "war" on anything? Have we become such a glibly militaristic culture--with our War on Drugs, War on Terror, War on Poverty, and "culture war," not to mention our less rhetorical wars on Afghanistan and Iraq--that every personal choice beats the drums of war? That isn't a rhetorical question. I think the answer is yes--we have. We celebrate violence in popular entertainment, in public policy, and in religion, and this is not unique in human history. There are very few cultures in the world that have not been, at least at times, cultures of violence.

Everyone knows the story of the December 1914 Christmas truce between British and German soldiers, which temporarily broke up months of trench warfare during World War I. Fewer people know that during the caroling, one of the British soldiers shouted: "I'd rather die than sing German!" The Christmas season is like that in many ways--a rare truce between and among a religiously diverse group of people, all of whom celebrate some sort of religious or cultural holiday at this time of year. And in the midst of that truce, every now and then people who have grown uncomfortable with this truce, secular and religious alike, might pipe up with their own version of "I'd rather die than sing German!"

We don't need to declare "war" on people like that. We just need to give them a slice of fruitcake and hope they lighten up.

So to all of you, my gentle readers, I say: happy (belated) Hanukkah. Happy (very belated) Diwali. Merry Christmas. Eid mubarak. Happy Solstice. Happy Kwanzaa. Happy New Year.

Oh, and happy holidays.