merry xmas to the easily offended
first, check out the cartoon
at Rodge's.
Are you offended by the words "Merry Christmas", or nativity scenes, or fat guys with red hats? Then perhaps you need to get a grip, get off your soapbox and join us here in "Reality".
If you go to your local department store, and the clerk says "Season's Greetings", and you feel the need to call the local talk radio show afterwards to bitch about it, the same goes to you. If you are blistering mad because the President wished the press mob "Happy Holidays", let me know when it occurs to you that you sound like just as much of a nutter as the folks that scream bloody murder every time the "C" word pops up.
If I own a business, and I decide to send out generic cards to my clients, guess what it'll have on it? Snowflakes and a big shiny Happy Holidays. Snowmen saying Seasons Greetings. Because a large, and growing, and vocal minority in this country couldn't care one whit about Christmas. I'm not just talking about the 'tards that are actively offended by Christmas and whose ears turn red with anger at the mention of anything Holy, but also people that may get into the holidays but don't have much of a reaction either way to Christmas, either because they celebrate a different holiday or don't cite a specific one at all.
It would be entirely too difficult to include everyone, and indeed would be silly to even attempt, with a single short statement. Not to avoid offending the nuts, but to include all the sane people out there.
Wait, no, it's not hard at all: Happy Holidays. Generic statements like that aren't a sign of the pagan hordes waiting to overrun America. It's a wish of well-being to everyone. It's "Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, Cheery Kwanza, Skippy Soltice, blah blah blah" all rolled into two simple words. For some reason, some people react to those two words as if they are meant to be exclusive toward, or diminishing to, Christmas. It's not. It's Christmas plus everything else.
Having said that, I also want to say that James Wolcott is
still a nutjob. There
are people that react violently to the word "Christmas", ass-head. It's not some sort of imaginary conspiracy we dreamed up in the middle of the night so righties could have something to bitch about. Besides that, anybody that can read past a fourth grade level can see that Lileks wasn't exactly screaming about the de-Christification of Christmas, he was making an observation about something he found amusing. Good job, James: distorting somebody's words to make an asinine, incorrect point. At least you made it with style, if whiny and petty can be called "style".
