I am normally fairly sparse on the holiday posts, but then, this is the first year I have not been in retail while running this site. For the previous years, I have experienced what I thought was the bottom of Christmas spirit. I got to see parents dragging around starving children with no coats or shoes while shopping for the expensive electronics they would later be buying with the welfare money they got to fee and cloth their children. I have got to see people crowded around fighting over the last $30 DVD player, because the $35 one we always carried was just too damn expensive. I got to hear people complain about long lines, sold out product, and bad parking and then get yelled at for not being the most chipper person in the world. I have seen children lost, parents who didn't care, and more theft than most people would believe.
Now the point: I am getting annoyed at all the media and general bullshit with the phrase "Happy Holidays" vs "Merry Christmas". All of the attention I have seen revolves around Christians attacking atheists and atheists getting really defensive and ready to lash out. But I honestly don't think it has anything to do with Christians or atheits, but instead big companies who stand to make a lot of money this time of year. The last few weeks of December hold Christmas, the winter Solstice, Channukkah, Kwanzaa, New Years Eve, and probably a few others I have not been educated about. Now stop for a second and think about why Christmas is blown up every year, and if you come up with any answer other than companies are trying to make money off of people, you are either living under a rock or...well, you are living under a rock. If this were not a capitalistic society, Christmas would be much like other holidays and get some attention, but not enough to where people start shopping for it six months in advance. Now slip on your I am a big business advertiser hat. According to the US census 76.6% of the US population is Christian, which means that saying "Merry Christmas" is excluding 23.4% of the population. You could significantly increase your advertising costs by also running pro-Jewish ads as well, but that will only pull in another 1.3%, not very cost effective, or you could drop religion dependance all together and just have to run one ad campaign. And if you do it right, you can cash in on a number of holidays all at once. You would not even have to have a seperate New Years push if you didn't want to, just use an all encompassing "Happy Holidays" and you cover them all. And if things go wrong and people get angry that you are not catering specifically to their religion, you can proudly say that you are trying to include everyone. This has two effects, it makes other religeons happy because you are including them, and it makes all the Christians think you just trying to not piss off the atheists because every Christian knows if you don't believe in Jesus you are an atheist, so you have a scapegoat. And since that scape goat is only .4% of the population, you are not losing a lot of people.
What is amusing about the "Happy Holidays" thing is what it emcompases. You are celebrating the birth of Jesus and also celebrating a fairly insignificant holiday of the people who killed Jesus. Now Chanukkah has nothing to do with Jesus, and is a celebration of rededication, but still, it is mildly amusing. There is also the idea that the birth of Christ coincides almost perfectly with the begining of Chanukkah, which starts the sunset of December 25th, and Kwanzaa, which starts on the 26th of December. Why? Well, because Jesus was a black jew.
