"Happy Holidays". The ugly, dishonest evil at the heart of the Radical Right has once again revealed itself, this time in phony indignation at the use of the expression "Happy Holidays" in place of "Merry Christmas". Posing as victims of a newly militant "multicultural" attack from enemies of Christianity, the Radical Right is actually attacking the true religious and cultural diversity of this magnificent society.
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Theirs is not a desperate counterattack but a new, one-sided crusade against a long-established tradition.
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Their pretense of late is that the White House, corporations, and other people who should know better are newly disrespecting Christmas by sending out "holiday" cards and wishing people "Happy Holidays". That is a baldface lie.
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The White House, including the Bush White House, has been sending out "holiday" cards for a very long time, probably generations. And "Happy Holidays" has been with us since before my birth. I am soon to be 61 years old.
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When this phony indignation came to the fore this season, I remembered very clearly an old movie tune, "Happy Holiday", and tracked it down today on the Internet. It comes from the movie Holiday Inn, starring Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, and Marjorie Reynolds — in 1942!
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Essentially everyone in this country knows that song, because it has been with us so very long, as pop songs go. Here are the lyrics.

Happy holiday, happy holiday
While the merry bells keep ringing
May your ev'ry wish come true

Happy holiday, happy holiday
May the calendar keep bringing
Happy holidays to you

In looking for a sound file for readers of this blog to listen to, I came across a commentary by someone else who knows full well that the expression "Happy Holiday(s)" has been with us for a very long time and is not a new attack upon Christmas. 11 days ago, Suzanne Cassidy of the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania Patriot-News also pointed out that the song "Happy Holiday" appeared in a major movie in 1942. (In fact, it was copyrighted in 1941, yet another year into the distant past.)
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Apparently the Bill O'Reilly's of the Radical Right think their audience is so ignorant that they don't know about the song "Happy Holiday" and will actually believe that there is some sinister new 'plot against Christmas'. And perhaps O'Reilly's audience really is that ignorant. But the Nation is not.
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When I was growing up, in the 1940s and '50s, I saw and heard the phrase "Happy Holidays" all the time, and assumed it referred to Christmas and New Year's: one card, one greeting, for two holidays exactly one week apart. Oh, no. That's not the significance of the greeting, we are now told. It is not to cover New Year's as well as Christmas, but also Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and every other conceivable holiday — pagan Rome's Saturnalia, for chrissake — in derogation of Christmas. What a bunch of bull.
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I yield to no one in my hostility to Judaism, but I'm a little surprised that Radical Rightwingers, who are usually also stridently Radical Zionist, militantly object to a greeting at this time of year that might accommodate Hanukkah. We have sent 160,000 soldiers and spent over $300 billion (and climbing) to defend Israel, but won't accommodate Hanukkah in our "season's greetings"? That seems to me more than a little bizarre.
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The movie Holiday Inn's song "Happy Holiday" was written by Irving Berlin, an American Jew born in Russia. I thought the Radical Right loved Irving Berlin. But apparently Berlin's writing a "holiday" song that enabled Jews to see themselves as Real Americans was subversive of the Nation's Christian identity. Who knew?
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Radical Rightists love to portray themselves as the hapless victims of aggression from the nearly insuperable forces of atheism, godless liberalism, etc., and use that asserted aggrievedness and desperate defensiveness to aggress against nonbelievers. Every year they try to push the nonreligious more and more to the fringes of society and impose compulsory religion upon the unwilling. And all the while they are initiating new predations upon nonconformists, they pretend that what they are pushing is not innovation but tradition.
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They pretend that we have always had "In God We Trust" as our national motto, when in fact the Founding Fathers chose "E Pluribus Unum" ("Out of Many, One").
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Rightwingers imply that "In God We Trust" has always been on our money, paper and metal, but in reality it did not appear on any currency of any kind until 1864, a full 88 years (about 4 generations, in those days) after the Declaration of Independence ('four score and eight', one might term that year — a year after Lincoln's dedication of the burial ground at Gettysburg) — and did not appear on any paper currency until 1957! That's 15 years after "Happy Holiday" debuted onscreen.
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So which is our tradition? "Happy Holiday" and "E Pluribus Unum"? Or "In God We Trust" and "Merry Christmas"?
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Whose tradition is it that we are supposed to enthrone? At what cost?
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A poll this month shows that 94% of Americans believe that God exists, tho they are not necessarily certain of that belief, and only 1% are sure there is no God.
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How can anyone, in this scientific age, be certain that something does not exist? We know that many things we cannot see, such as microbes, or hear, such as dog whistles, do exist nonetheless, so it would be rash in the extreme to assert certitude that something else we cannot see nor hear does not exist. But we can believe that all evidence we have seen to date compels the conclusion that God is a fantasy — for some, a benign fantasy; for others, an extremely malign fantasy.

Conservatives are more likely to be convinced than liberals (87% vs. 61%), women a little more likely than men (82% vs. 73%), and residents of the South more than those in the East (88% vs. 70%).

However, you don't have to believe in God to celebrate the birth of Jesus.
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Even atheists can honor the teachings and thus the memory of Jesus of Nazareth, and therefore celebrate his birth, albeit with sadness for what happened to him when he ran up against intolerance from the religious authorities of His day. (We can even capitalize any pronoun that refers to Him, out of respect for His moral majesty, if not his godhood.)
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The crucifixion of Jesus may, indeed, be the most powerful argument against religious intolerance that anyone can make.
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Jesus said things that the high priests of the established religion of His place and time did not want to hear, and indeed did not want any Jew to hear. They silenced Him, by killing Him. But they didn't silence His followers, tho the Jewish leadership of the day did indeed try to kill all of them too.
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The disciples of Jesus believed themselves to be Jews — true and devout Jews. They weren't. Rather, they were the first Christians, believers in a doctrine completely at variance with and irreconcilable with Judaism, tho it sprang from the same intellectual roots. Their God of Love was not the Jews' God of Wrath, tho they tried to believe that the two plainly different gods were one and the same.
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Maybe they understood, privately, that their Trinity comprised the God of Wrath (the Father), the God of Love (the Son), and the intermediary and redeemer (the Holy Ghost, or Spirit) who was able somehow to make sense of nonsense: that the God of the Jews was (that is, could be) the God of the Christians. Who knows?
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That's not how the doctrine came down to us, but you have to wonder why Christianity had to posit a God of three natures, if the natures were all the same.
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In any case, we who are ethical tho not religious Christians have enormous respect for Jesus. Not just for His sacrifice, which was horrible and painful — tho we don't for an instant believe that somehow His dying on the Cross magically cleansed the human race of Original Sin (which no sane person could believe in to begin with), nor that when He ascended to Heaven He took with Him all the sins of true believers — but for His magnanimous and brilliant teachings on forgiveness.
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Jesus understood, tho He may not have presented His understanding thus, that when we hate and hold on to rancor, we consign ourselves to pain, and to diminution of the value and quality of our own lives. Jesus understood that when we forgive, we lift a burden from ourselves, and let the ugliness and anger pass out of our lives. Jesus understood that when you refuse to return one evil deed with another, you end the war between individuals that the one deed could otherwise produce. That, in not fiting back, you give permission to your attacker to discontinue his attack, and give him the chance to ennoble himself in breaking off the attack. When you "turn the other cheek", then, you shame the conscience of the person who would strike you, and his conscience, which is the voice of God within his head, might then be heard.
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No, it doesn't always happen. Unfortunately. And sometimes there is no choice but to fite or die. But Jesus taught us to "give peace a chance" before we go to war.
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For that, and for His many other ethical teachings, even atheists are deeply grateful to the memory of Jesus of Nazareth. We honor Him. We love Him.
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You don't have to be religious to understand the brilliance of the positive inducement to "do the right thing" that Jesus propounded in His Golden Rule: "As you would have others do to you, so too do to them." He gave us a single rule — consider that: one rule — by which we could make tens of thousands of decisions throughout life. And that is reason enuf to want to bring Him presents on His birthday. If we can't give those gifts to Him, Himself, we can at least give them to others knowing that, in His value system as He told it to us, what we do to the least among us, we do to Him.
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For ethical Christians, Christmas is a terribly sad time, because we acknowledge at once the birth of hope and the vicious attempts to extinguish hope. The joyous birth of the baby Jesus is tinged by the sadness we feel that the world was not ready for His message. And isn't ready still.
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The United States can become a gigantic Lebanon or India at Partition, in which religious communities are literally at each other's throat, stabbing and slashing, blowing people up, shooting them, killing everyone who does not believe what the violent lunatics among us believe. Or we can pull back from that particular precipice and let Santa Claus (not "Saint Nick"), Frosty the Snowman, and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer unite us in a merry time of year filled with bells and carols.
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I prefer happy holidays to civil war, don't you?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,152.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:40 AM