Christmas was ruined!

[mmcirvin]

The "War On Christmas" hysteria is going full steam again:

Governments that have put "holiday trees" on display have been lambasted, and retailers that wish customers "Happy Holidays" have been threatened with boycotts and pestered with phone calls and online petitions. Started three years ago, the campaign will be the groups' largest.

That these people see their paranoid, joy-killing shaming campaigns about how people celebrate a holiday as a fight against "political correctness" is one of the most extreme expressions of Poetic Justice as Fairness that I've ever seen.

(Especially since, before these campaigns began, the American religious right usually satisfied itself with complaining about the modern celebration of Christmas being too Santa-y and not Jesus-y enough. I have to admit that reframing their annual carping about Christmas in terms of a defense against anti-Christmas forces is a canny move.)

I'll also say what others have said before: my recollection is that all this genericized "Happy Holidays" stuff started not as a sop to Madalyn Murray O'Hair and her religion-averse friends, but as an attempt to be inclusive of Jews. It was perhaps somewhat feeble in that capacity—I know I've heard Jews complain about the ahistorical elevation of Hanukkah as a Christmas substitute—but I sometimes wonder if the campaign against "Happy Holidays" really has easily-offended secular humanists as its primary target.

Comments

[jwgh]

I seem to remember complaints about the secularization and commercialization of Christmas from when I was growing up too. Do those still happen?

It seems like if you want to encourage public celebrations of a holiday in a commercial, secular culture the result will be the commercialization and secularization of that holiday, but I suppose that many would try to question the second half of that.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Oh, certainly. And of course the complaints about its commercialization happen right across the political board, from left to right, even though it never seems to stop it from proceeding.