Correcting Our Seasonal Political Incorrectness, Correctly

I’m getting a bit lost in this whole Christmas greetings thing. Help?

Let me set the scene. I’m an atheist, born Catholic. So is my wife. To me, this is the “Christmas” season. I was raised to think of it that way.

As I grew up and away from the Church, I discovered that every culture has a festival celebrating the time of year when the days get longer and the descent into winter begins to turn toward spring, and that those celebrations usually involve feasting, gifts, lights, song, reflection, celebration of community, and all the other good things about being human. Call it Yule, Beiwe, Soyal, Dōngzhì, Koleda, Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, Hanukkah, Saturnalia, or Eid ul-Fitr: everyone is celebrating something this time of year.

From a personal perspective, I usually offer good wishes to people in this season by saying “Merry Christmas”. If I’m aware that a person is celebrating another festival, I’ll use their seasonal greeting. Not because I’m afraid of offending them, but because it’s polite. I’m offering an expression of goodwill; not a challenge, not a demand for their cultural acquiescence, not a threat to their belief system.

From a corporate perspective, my staff includes practicing and non-practicing Christians, Muslims, Jews, agnostics, atheists, and few I’m not sure of. We provide service to a wide number of cultural groups, whom I assume represent the same diversity. From a corporate perspective, when we wish to express compliments of the season, we can neither speak as a Christian (because our company is not) nor to an exclusively Christian audience (because our clients are not). So we generally opt for a generic “Happy Holiday” message.

It appears that some companies have made a business decision to make their pitch directly to the disgruntled “War On Christmas” crowd. This may or may not be a good business decision. It is certainly a political one: the site linked to, which boasts about the need to return Christ to Christmas, features a Cross emblazoned with the Stars and Stripes and the US Motto. But it’s a market niche, and if it works, more power to them.

I’m fifty-seven years old, I’ve traveled a fair bit, and I’ve worked full-time and at length in at least three other cultural settings, and for shorter periods in dozens of others. I have never once in all those years been rebuked by a non-Christian for wishing them “Merry Christmas”. Nor have I ever been rebuked by a Christian for wishing them a “Happy Holiday”. Maybe I’m just lucky, but I’ve found that people respond to the sincere expression of goodwill, rather than its cultural frame.

Up to this point, it’s been pretty simple. But this year I notice a new wrinkle. Some of the folks who seem to sincerely believe that Christmas is under assault, and who take great exception to the recognition of anyone else’s holiday in this season, are wishing each other “Happy Hanukkah”.

I must therefore turn humbly to the cultural critics who are fighting to save the integrity of the season with two questions:
- Why do you take exception to a business (which, as far as I know, cannot be baptized, and is therefore not Christian) using greetings or marketing that acknowledge that other people are celebrating the season too?
- I like Hanukkah too (always been a big dreidel fan) – but why is “Happy Hanukkah” okay if your goal is to insist that only Christianity should be acknowledged during the season?