Holidays

by Suzanne Poor
For the past two holiday seasons, Jim Gearhart, morning talk show host at NJ 101.5 FM, has been complaining about how Christmas is no longer the fete we grew up loving. One of his callers pointed out the irony of how the opinions of a few are affecting the lives of millions. Another was furious that Coke had taken Santa Claus out of its advertising. And that same day, AOL posted a photograph of what appeared to be the lighted Rockefeller Center Christmas tree with the question “What kind of tree?”

What’s going on here? A few radicals, convinced that traditional celebrations of whatever named faiths — Islam, Christian, Jew, Buddhist, Kwanzaa, pagan — are intrusive, objectionable, a violation of the separation of church and state, not to mention imposing the tenets of another faith on individuals, are in the process making them all bland.
You’d think referring to December 25 as Christmas (never mind that its provenance is indeed pagan) is offensive to all the others. Or that Hanukah offends people who celebrate Ramadan (never mind that Muslim ritual comes at a different time of year).

Whatever the faith, conceived as myth and symbol and now cherished by multitudes — whether suspension of disbelief or reality in the mind — let’s please call a Christmas tree a Christmas tree. Please, please let us sing our traditional carols and songs in schools and on the streets. Let us pray to our own gods and goddesses silently or openly and call them by their right names.

Ironically, there are others protesting this homogenizing of the winter holidays. Department stores like Federated Department Stores, Dillard’s Inc. and Victoria’s Secret Stores are using the word “Christmas” in their marketing instead of the generic “winter holiday.”

So to one and all — Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah, Joyeux Noel.

return to December 2005 Adtalk