About 3 years ago, the right wing trumped this up…it may have been Bill O’Reilly who came up with it, but even if he wasn’t the one to come up with it, he pushed it big time on his little TV show.
Basically, what happened was some retail stores, let’s say Wal-Marts had cashiers who would just wish people Merry Christmas. Well, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, etc. all shop at Wal-Mart, and a few of them became a bit offended because it came off to them like the cashiers were either assuming they were Christians or indicating that in their mind, it was the only proper holiday to celebrate…after all there are tons of religious and secular holidays this time of year, it does seem a bit presumptuous and exclusive when you get right down to it.
So, of course Wal-Mart (and other businesses as well) pays more attention to the bottom line than anything, and well, you simply can’t go around offending customers. Sure, they can’t sue you for wishing them a Merry Christmas, but if you piss them off, they’ll shop at Target instead.
So, because for many, many years we’ve all been saying “Happy Holidays” as a catch-all, Wal-Mart asked its employees to say “Happy Holidays” instead of Merry Christmas, and of course as goes Wal-Mart, so goes other retailers.
Now, this is all among the backdrop of a time when the right wing is none too happy about having to tolerate Muslims to begin with, considering what “they” did on 9/11.
At the same time, there were also people who were becoming offended by things like having a Christmas tree in government buildings. After all, maybe a Christmas tree is something that wouldn’t fly in their religion, but yt they go to work or to do official business with the state, and here they are confronted with this symbol they don’t believe in, and to add insult to injury, they see no representation of their religion in public places. And of course schools as well, like at my son’s school, there are students of all religions, and they don’t have Halloween or Christmas celebrations, they might celebrate harvest or “the holidays”.
Basically when we were a country where everyone was Christian, that was one thing, but we have a diverse population now. And now that not everyone is a Christian and other religions are well represented, some people feel as though Christianity is becoming institutionalized, even though we’re SUPPOSED to have a separation of church and state. And even though these minorities are not calling for every building to have every religious symbol for every holiday, there are certain times when common sense says maybe we shouldn’t have any representation of religion. And when you’re dealing with the public, you don’t always know who that other person is so from both a business and common courtesy standpoint, you might say “Happy Holidays”.
But guys like O’Reilly don’t look at the world the way it should be, they look at it the way it was, the good old days when being a white, Christian man meant you had the world by the tail. Not like today, it seems to guys like this that every time someone wants to have equal rights, it means that rights are taken away from guys like him. So they get all upset, because in the past, they’d go into a store and someone would say Merry Christmas and they’d say Merry Christmas back, and that’s how it always was, so that’s the way it should have continued to be in their minds.
And so every time they are called upon to be sensitive to someone different from themselves, it’s like “this was MY world, why should I have to change the way I do things?” And so because it’s the job of bloviators like this to make hay out of what’s goig on in the world so people will watch his pathetic excuse for a show, they turn something as innocent as people trying to be inclusive of all into an outright “War on Christmas.”
Anyone who says that is DEFINITELY a right wing blowhard who gets his news from guys like Limbaugh and O’Reilly and Hannity, you can bet your last dollar on that. But remember this. O’Reilly went on The Late Show with David Letterman a couple years ago and he started to spout off about this so called war on Christmas, and you know what Dave said to him?
“I have the feeling that about 60% of what you say is crap.”
Which, if I’d been there when this guy started spouting off is EXACTLY what I’d have said.
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