Everything that follows in this post must be qualified by the fact that your host lives only 1/4 of a mile from a major regional mall featuring: a Best Buy, Circuit City, Good Guys, CompUSA, Sportmart, Linens-N-Things, Bed Bath & Beyond, Lowe's, Home Depot, two movie theaters, and assorted smaller retailers and restaurants. So his view that December coincides with a transformation of a majority of people into vicious, reckless hooligans may be distorted by mall-specific effects. Nevertheless, he's been thinking for a while about the larger cultural significance of saying "happy holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas", "Happy Hannukah", or other holiday-specific greetings. Additionally, commentators both left and right have lately been debating the place of "Merry Christmas" in the public square, which makes this reasonably timely. So here goes:
The day after Thanksgiving has long been commemmorated as "Black Friday", the busiest shopping day of the year, and the day when many retailers go from net losses to profitability (the "black" contrasting with "red ink" used to record losses). Turns out that it isn't so, but it's the sort of myth that comports well with the human instinct to create rituals and assign meaning to otherwise unexplainable events.
It's hard not to see a sort of secular religion in the shopping madness that does occur on the day. People line up at hours they would never be caught awake for otherwise to catch the sacrifices offered to the first hundred people, or for the first hour only. The entrails are read afterward to try to predict the future, and acted on nearly instantaneously by investors managing billions of dollars. And in the rush to bring as many converts in as possible, there is a relentless push to neutralize any language which might be less than maximally inclusive.
Thus, Virgin Mobile phones runs a commercial (sorry, no link available) encouraging people to enjoy a happy "Chrismahanukwanzaakah". And the TV show "The O.C." coins another theologically incoherent term, Chrismukkah, which as the linked Wall Street Journal article notes, has produced a real business in equally incoherent greeting cards. And before either of these, there were sporadic attempts to coin an equally infelicitous Hanumas. The earnestness of these appeals, including the tin ears for language behind these coinages, lends itself very much to satire, a banner taken up by Jerry Seinfeld and friends under the name Festivus. Seinfeld's mock holiday included the exchange of grievances instead of gifts, nicely capturing the ethos of the real event being celebrated during December. The truth is that there is a very different holiday celebrated during December, which owes almost nothing to the stories of Christmas or Hanukkah, nor to the principles elucidated by the inventor of Kwanzaa.
Since the event lacks a formal name, we might as well extract it from its associated greeting, and call it Holidays. Holidays is a sort of inversion of Christmas, focusing as it does on purchasing gifts to the exclusion of any meaningful discussion of the original religious stories, as opposed to discussing the stories and incidentally passing along gifts (though see this Dennis Prager column in defense of gift-giving). The problem is not so much in the giving of gifts -- the number and kind of which are nobody else's business, in any event -- but in the ideology that motivates it. Here again, there are profound differences in language.
The authentic Christmas message is most readily summed up in the slogan "Jesus is the reason for the season" (although this is not necessarily the same as "Jesus is the reason for the date", an issue which provides an opening for certain members of the "bah, humbug!" persuasion). While SC will not pretend to any deep insight into Christian theology, surely it is no great stretch to say that the symbolic power of the holiday derives from its annunciation of the coming of the Messiah. The three kings played a role, of course, but the story is about hope and redemption, and only incidentally about gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
Similarly, the message of Hanukkah is readily captured by the slogan "Nes Gadol Hayah Sham", which translates as "A great miracle happened there". This slogan can be found on dreidels around the world, except in Israel, where they read "Nes Gadol Hayah Poh" instead, meaning "A great miracle happened here". The miracle, of course, was the lasting of a single day's worth of oil for eight days while the Temple was being rededicated. A gift of sorts, but again, the story is supposed to be about redemption and miracles, and not so much about gelt.
Holidays doesn't have a slogan, not being based on any coherent principles, but one drive through a mall parking lot suggests the line of Robert Burns about "man's inhumanity to man". SC would like nothing more than to agree with Dennis Prager on the generally salutary nature of a season of gift-giving, but it's awfully hard when mixed with people elbowing each other aside in stores, making right turns from left lanes when they realize they're headed for the wrong part of a mall, and generally behaving with an attitude of total rudeness towards anyone getting in the way of their generosity. The problem with Holidays -- or Chrismukkah, or Festivus -- is that in celebrating everything, it celebrates nothing, and it is precisely the lack of a slogan (apart from a greeting) which demonstrates the spiritual emptiness of celebrating gift-giving without a meaningful context.
For these reasons, SC finds it very hard to get notably exercised when strangers say "Merry Christmas!", Jewish though he is. This is true even when, as happened the day before Hanukkah started, a Hallmark cashier rang him up for a box of Hanukkah candles and a tube of wrapping paper decorated with Stars of David, and nevertheless said "Merry Christmas!". To those of non-Christian religions inclined to take offense, he suggests replying with "Happy Hanukkah" or even "Happy Eid" (although it's especially late for that) -- if one takes seriously the idea that saying "Merry Christmas" is a non-proselytizing sharing of faith, then one shouldn't get upset at having other faiths shared back (SC has now failed for the 5th year in a row to send Brent Bozell a Hanukkah card, ever since the man plainly went begging for one). As for those inclined to turn a gimlet eye to religion more generally, SC can only offer a previous argument that tolerance includes the same forbearance to the majority that the minority wishes to receive. In that spirit, Merry Christmas!
Recent Comments