It's Called "Christmas"
This past Friday was Pittsburgh's annual Light-Up Night event, a civic event that signifies the start of the holiday season - not the Christmas season, but the holiday season. As a man who was born and raised Jewish, I used to find it amusing when people tried to sanitize the holiday season so as to be inoffensive; now I'm more offended by it.
Companies Running Scared
My employer this year distributed a list of official holidays on which the company would be closed. The usual suspects are all there: Labor Day, Memorial Day, Martin Luther King Day, and so forth, but two stuck out like sore thumbs: Spring Holiday and Winter Holiday. Purely by coincidence, Spring Holiday was the same day as Good Friday and Winter Holiday will be the Monday following Christmas. (You could also claim, therefore, that my company gives Boxing Day or the first day of Kwanzaa as a Winter Holiday, but next year Christmas is on a Monday and Winter Holiday will be rescheduled accordingly.)
"Spring Holiday"? To me, that term suggests the start of spring, the Vernal Equinox, recognized as a minor sabbat by Wiccans. Personally I don't find anything wrong with the Christian holiday name - regardless of whether you go to church or not, who doesn't like a good Friday?
I don't think the name "Christmas" is offensive. If you do, you should boycott any movie starring anyone named "Christian," and that's a tough feat considering IMDb lists 4,007 people with that name. You should avoid eating a Monte Cristo sandwich, and forget about baseball - do you know how many Jesuses there are out there? Major League Baseball really ought to look into that so as to avoid upsetting people.
What upsets me most about this is that there is an irrational fear of using religious terms out there. It is not illegal to be religious in this country, nor has it ever been, nor will it ever be. In a time when Americans vote in great numbers based on morals and values, there is still this fear that if you say the word "Christmas" around someone who is Jewish, the Jew will sue you. I have absolutely no respect for anyone who boycotts a business based on a tasteful display of religion. If I walk into Wal-Mart and the greeter hands me a Jack Chick tract, that'll be the last time I walk in there. Red and green decorations don't offend me, except when companies don't offer any explanation as to what the colors mean. Christmas trees don't offend me. Nativity scenes don't offend me any more than religious paintings or sculptures would. I don't expect Jewish people to be any more offended by "Merry Christmas" than Christians would be by "Happy Chanukah." It's confusing at worst, perhaps worthy of a gentle correction. You can't sue over it and only the most fanatical consumers would declare a boycott over it. It makes no more sense to boycott a store for saying "Merry Christmas" than it does to boycott a store for not saying it.
Mixed Families
My father's side of the family is Jewish while my mother's side is mostly Christian. Growing up it was nice to double-dip in December and the spring. We had a fake Christmas tree with lights and everything and we had a menorah. Eventually my parents decided to dispense with the overconsumption and drop the holiday I wasn't raised to recognize as "holy." Nevertheless it was still fun to go to grandma's for Easter (which, as far as I knew, was about jellybeans and that stupid plastic grass). Now I have to remind some of my family members, "It's okay to give me an Easter basket or a Christmas cookie." I appreciate the sentiment but don't like the patronizing feeling behind a "holiday cookie."
Exercising the Right Not To Offend
Sanitizing the holidays by removing what little spirituality is left of them displays a very bad trend. It suggests that Jews, who are way behind other groups in calling for corporate boycotts due to political differences, will organize to damage corporations they dislike. Ignoring the whole "Jews control the world" conspiracy theory, that's about 2% of your customer base you risk annoying - and that includes folks like me who happily drive Volkswagens with the knowledge that they were the original Hitlermobile.
Happy whichever-holiday-it-is-that-you-celebrate-if-any, everyone.