Happy Holidays

It amuses me to read about the discomfort some people have with "Happy Holidays" rather than "Merry Christmas." Somehow the change in greeting becomes another example of the persecution of Christians.

I was raised in the Church of Christ, a fundamentalist denomination to the right of Baptists, and the more conservative Church of Christ congregations had "holiday parties" rather than "Christmas parties," because the Bible doesn't tell Christians to celebrate Christ's birth. And if it isn't in the Bible, then the conservative wing felt it was wrong. The dictum was "speak where the Bible speaks, and be silent where the Bible is silent." More liberal denominations might talk of Christmas, but generally did not sing Christmas caroles during worship and certainly had no nativity reenactment or anything so "popish."

This leads me to think that it isn't the fundamentalists who are griping about "Happy Holidays" rather than "Merry Christmas." It's the people who work for the religion machine, Christianism. That's the money-making, corporate-religious, politically partisan, Christianistic henchman, the modern-day Pharisee.

And the irony to me is that religious groups struggled to change public-school halloween festivals to "fall festivals" because of the "pagan" aspects of halloween. But the origins of Christmas are in the "pagan" celebrations of the winter solstice, which fell around December 25 under the old Roman calendar. Christmas was invented to incorporate of the worldwide celebration of solstice--the point where days stopped getting shorter and began getting longer--the day that heralded the sun's triumph over darkness.