{"id":30941,"date":"2025-12-01T00:11:21","date_gmt":"2025-12-01T08:11:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sandiegotroubadour.com\/?p=30941"},"modified":"2025-12-02T11:37:23","modified_gmt":"2025-12-02T19:37:23","slug":"merry-christmas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sandiegotroubadour.com\/merry-christmas\/","title":{"rendered":"Merry Christmas"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I got my first \u201chappy holidays\u201d of the year today, and that means you get to hear my yearly exhortation on the matter, which is this: please just say Merry Christmas. I am a Jewish person and I\u2019m here to say: it\u2019s okay. It\u2019s not mean or unfair that you have a big holiday at this time of year. It\u2019s totally fine. The day is called Christmas whether you celebrate the religious birth narrative or not; it\u2019s a federal holiday and that\u2019s the name of it. You can say it, it\u2019s totally fine.<\/p>\n

We all know that the holiday people really<\/em> mean when they say \u201chappy holidays\u201d truly is Christmas anyway. Some folks are kind-hearted and fear that saying the word Christmas<\/em> implies that the person they are saying it to also celebrates the same holiday. But it implies no such thing. \u201cHave a good weekend\u201d doesn\u2019t imply the person hearing it works Monday through Friday. It just acknowledges that lots of people do <\/em>have weekends off, including the speaker, and that lots of other people know that.<\/p>\n

It would be silly to say, \u201cI am grateful that there are days of the week that mean something to me, and I don\u2019t want to say what it is, but I hope you have a day or days of the week that mean something to you so I can say something<\/em>.\u201d It\u2019s the weekend. We all know what that means. It\u2019s okay just to say it.<\/p>\n

People sometimes say, \u201cBut it is a few different holidays close together\u201d\u2014meaning, Christmas and New Year\u2019s, and maybe Thanksgiving too, even though that\u2019s a whole month before. And it\u2019s true, they are a week apart. But Halloween and Veterans Day are 10 days apart, and we never lump them together into a big fun-sized bag of \u201cThank you for your service and your candy.\u201d Valentine\u2019s Day and Presidents\u2019 Day are even closer, often as short as a day apart, and yet we don\u2019t give each other hearts that say, \u201cBe my bank holiday.\u201d So, it\u2019s not really about that. Generous-spirited people just adopted that explanation in retrospect.<\/p>\n

People also say, \u201cBut it\u2019s not Christmas for everyone, and there are other celebrations at the same time.\u201d That\u2019s true too, but again\u2026it\u2019s not why people say \u201chappy holidays.\u201d If it were, they\u2019d also say it in April, when Easter, Passover, and Ramadan often occur simultaneously. These are arguably far more meaningful, culturally, to the relevant celebrants, than the mishmash of December observances. Yet, we don\u2019t even have a \u201cchristmahanukwanzakah,\u201d the turducken<\/em> of holiday wishes, for these April celebrations, let alone a catch-all watered-down way of referring to them all in the most archetypical manner possible.<\/p>\n

No, this is not why people say \u201chappy holidays.\u201d<\/p>\n

Can I tell you why we say it?<\/p>\n

At some point in the last century, Christmas in the United States morphed into the Super Bowl of holidays. It wasn\u2019t always thus. In fact, when the first European Christians squatted their pale, quail-fed Enlightenment Era buttockses upon this fine already-settled land, they prohibited the celebration of Christmas. They felt it was frivolous, secular, and non-pious. Which it was! Most of the traditions associated with the holiday\u2014tinsel, ornaments, stockings, singing, small gifts\u2014far pre-dated the story of Jesus\u2019 birth and were just for kicks. For the first 350 years after Jesus\u2019 death, they were still just an ongoing amalgam of winter solstice traditions, completely unrelated to the burgeoning new religion. In somewhere around 350AD, as the church was trying to expand the reach of its new religion, it made the decision to set Jesus\u2019 birthday on the date of the existing cultural celebration, when people were carousing anyway, with the hope that it would entice more people to celebrate the religious birth story. Even then, there was a distinction made between the religious celebration of that birth story, and the cultural traditions of Saturnalia, Yule, and other pre-Christian winter solstice observances.<\/p>\n

And it was pretty raucous back then too! It was not your grandma\u2019s midnight mass at St. Patrick\u2019s Cathedral. The vibe was closer to Mardi Gras than to the Macy\u2019s parade.<\/p>\n

So, the Puritans wanted none of that in the \u201cNew World.\u201d But during and after the Civil War, the cultural component of the Christmas commemoration was seen as a way to bring families together again, and to that end, it was designated a federal (that is, secular) holiday in the wake of the war in 1870.<\/p>\n

Then, in the 1900s, some savvy marketers saw the potential to turn this family-focused federal holiday into a commercial opportunity. They bigged up the fat, jolly, hyper-caucasian gift-giving reindeer-wrangler and turned the presents into the centerpiece of the American version of the day. It\u2019s been off to the shopping races ever since. Superbowl time.<\/p>\n

Now, completely coincidentally, there is a holiday on the Jewish calendar that often falls around the winter solstice celebrations. It\u2019s a minor holiday, something a bit like VE Day; it exists, it celebrates a victory, there are some traditions and meanings associated with it, but it\u2019s not one of the biggies on the calendar. But one of those minor traditions is the giving of small gifts.<\/p>\n

So Jewish kids in the last century watched their non-Jewish friends getting GI Joe with the Kung Fu grip, while they, the Jewish kids, got a piece of dry chocolate wrapped in foil it was impossible to get all of it out from. Eventually, the cultural pressure toward gifts shifted Hannukah, the minor Jewish December holiday, into something more like a \u201cJewish Christmas.\u201d Runner-up Superbowl. The \u201cother\u201d halftime show counterprogramming Bad Bunny.<\/p>\n

Soon, religious folks again began reasserting the holiday\u2019s place as a religious commemoration\u2014often without completely realizing that the day had never, even once in history, been non-secular, at least in part. That reassertion happened after<\/em> the American commercialization had taken hold. This had the unintended\u2014ironic\u2014effect of making it seem like the cultural components, right down to the gifts, were all part and parcel of the religious one. It made it seem as if the Federal holiday of \u201cChristmas\u201d was the religious commemoration of Christ\u2019s Mass. But it wasn\u2019t and never was. Vice versa!<\/p>\n

Sometime, toward the last half of the last century, that shift turned \u201cMerry Christmas\u201d into something religion-associated. That benign wish began to carry new weight and took on an implied asterisk: \u201cMerry Christmas** or whatever Christmas-like thing it is that you unfortunate non-Christian folks are stuck with instead.\u201d This is more nicely expressed as, \u201cHappy [whatever] holidays [you might be experiencing, since we can\u2019t tell by looking at you what that might be, and we don\u2019t want you to feel left out of this good thing we have going]!\u201d<\/p>\n

Some folks now include Kwanzaa in that mental fill-in-the-blank, with the irony being that that Kwanzaa is explicitly a casting off of the shackles of the commercialized Christmas celebrations, and instead an honoring of values rather than possessions\/gifts.<\/p>\n

But, stay with me. Christmas-the-federal-holiday, as opposed to Christ\u2019s Mass the religious celebration, is everywhere. Ev. Uh. Ree. Where. If you\u2019re a Jewish kid in this country, or an Amish kid, or a Jehovah\u2019s Witness, or Hindu, or Muslim, Wiccan, Satanist\u2026you know it\u2019s Christmas. It\u2019s literally the name of the day. The government is closed. Stores are closed. Tinsel abounds. People have reindeer antlers on their cars and walk around in Santa hats. Christmas, the winter-solstice celebration, has continued as an unaltered set of traditions, without interruption, from the time hundreds of years before Jesus was born, to now thousands of years after his death. It came to the US as a series of secular traditions and has continued as such since the country\u2019s founding. We. Know. It\u2019s. Christmas.<\/p>\n

We are not feeling left out of anything. Those who weren\u2019t brought up Christian aren\u2019t excluded from wishes that use the word Christmas. If anything, the legalistic generalization to \u201cholidays\u201d makes it seem like you think we need a bone thrown to us poor non-Christmas-ians. That\u2019s why \u201cHappy Holidays\u201d is such a bummer. It feels like pity. \u201cAll holidays matter.\u201d Sure, but the one that matters today, the reason you are saying anything at all, is Christmas.<\/p>\n

Also: I\u2019m Jewish, but not religious. I can\u2019t remember the last time I did anything religion-related for Hannukah. Maybe as a kid, or one year in college when my housemates were religious Jews. I can\u2019t even tell you each year when it starts. So, it\u2019s not my \u201choliday\u201d this time of year, happy or otherwise. In fact, as a non-religious atheist, I\u2019m far more bummed out at the assumption that I have a \u201choliday\u201d \u2014that is, that religion would be some kind of presumed natural state, which chafes at my psyche\u2014than that you wish me a happy what-the-day-is-actually-called-whether-or-not-I-also-adopt-the-birth-narrative-on-top-of-it.<\/p>\n

Think of it as you would your birthday. When someone wishes you a happy birthday, you don\u2019t say, \u201cWell, lots of other people have different birthdays, and some don\u2019t celebrate birthdays at all, and also it\u2019s National Kiss a Turnip Day and National Dandelion Appreciation Day, so it\u2019s best just to wish me a day and let me apply it as I wish.\u201d Nope. It\u2019s your birthday, we call it your birthday because that\u2019s what that day it is. Others do not crumble when we say it, they are not offended that it\u2019s not their birthday too, they don\u2019t feel left out or lesser than, they need no bones thrown to them as a result of it. You\u2019re just calling the day the thing it is.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t \u201call holidays matter\u201d me, bro!<\/p>\n

Exhortation over. I wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, and may you and those you love find happiness and peace in the coming year and beyond. I\u2019m grateful to you for the time you spend reading my column and spinning my tunes. Send me yours, please, I will read\/listen\/look\/like.<\/p>\n

On the topic of music, here<\/a> is my world-saddest-Christmas-song, probably no surprise there given the above. Give it a listen. Go forth. Celebrate. And if you see me, I promise that the way to make my \u201cholidays\u201d the happiest is to say, \u201cMerry Christmas,\u201d and trust that I know the spirit you mean it in. See you in 2026.<\/p>\n