Andreas quoted the NY Times: Religious conservatives are using Christmas for a political purpose: as a cudgel to push the prayers and displays of their own form of Christianity into public spaces, including public schools, and to make America more like a theocracy.
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That may well be, but it's still no reason to embrace the global corporate generic "holiday."
Christmas Trees should be called Christmas Trees. One does not achieve inclusiveness by rendering everything generic. That only serves the interests of global corporations.
Inclusiveness, IMHO, involves wishing people Merry Christmas and Happy Hannukah and Happy Kwanzaa as the circumstances merit. (At least that would show you are paying attention to individual differences and are willing to acknowledge them.) One doesn't have to be a Christian to enjoy Christmas or a Jew to attend a Hannukah celebration. Holidays have nonreligious components which are accessible to everyone.
Corporate generic style works the other way, to ignore traditions and throw everything into a neuter and robotic nothingness as "holiday." The false dichotomy presented by the NYT article is that one must be a true-believer or else an offended secular person eager to embrace the corporate generic term.
In the corporate route, Christmas Trees would become holiday trees, Menorahs and Kwanzaa Mishumaas, holiday candlesticks. Plus that Maypole Andreas said he danced around would become a holiday post. Just as the right-wing is using Christmas for a political purpose, certain left-wing elements are using Christmas to advance the global corporate agenda, only the left-wing is being more subtle about it.
Eric
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