Merry Christmas

Wish someone a Merry Christmas these days and you risk a lecture on political correctness. It seems that Happy Holidays is the preferred greeting, though holiday is starting to take a beating as well. It seems that Holiday is short for Holy Day. Perhaps it would be better to just keep our good wishes to ourselves. If we don't make someone's day brighter, at least we won't be making it dimmer either.

Personally I think that the political correctness police have got the whole thing backwards. The usual reasoning goes like so: We wish someone Merry Christmas, they might not be Christian. If they aren't Christian they might be offended that someone had the temerity to wish them a Merry Christmas. So it is better to water the whole thing down until no one could possibly be offended. I almost always hear this arguement from Christians, or post Christian Atheists. I have never been told off by Jew, Moslem, Hindu, Baha'i, Buddhist, or pagan.

There are a lot of problems with this approach, but the one that I don't hear talked about is that giving up on Merry Christmas breeds intolerance. That's right, by giving up our Merry Christmases we are spreading intolerance not understanding. If I give up saying Merry Christmas and any allusion to the Christmas Story that wasn't written in the last hundred years, then I am also tacitly telling my friends of other faiths that I don't want to hear their stories. After all it is only fair that if I give up Christmas that they should give up Hanukkah, Diwali, Ramadan, Kwanzaa, Solstice or whatever. Our society becomes as interesting as a turkey dinner after it has been put through a blender.

I figure I am going to wish people a Merry Christmas, and I hope that they will feel free to wish me whatever it is they want. We will be surrounded by celebrations of light and joy that will last for months, not just until Boxing Day. It is a good thing to be sensitive to people of other faiths, but that doesn't mean giving up our own. Rather it means listening to their stories as well as ours. We end up richer, not poorer for the exchange.

Think about it.

What do we want?

It seems to me that there is a great abyss between what we think we want and what will actually satisfy us. We drool over everything from big screen tv's to the hottest new cars. Each purchase we think will finally be the one that puts us over the top. We will now at last find happiness. Unfortunately whatever happiness we find only lasts until we see a bigger tv or sexier car. We are caught in a trap of feeling poorer and poorer, even while we are surrounded by piles of stuff that we never use.

So, what do we want? I think what most people truly want is to know that their lives matter. If what we do today will make a difference tomorrow, then we can rest content tonight. What would our lives look like if we decided that we were going to make our decisions based on what is going to change the world? What if we decided that instead of a car that can travel at twice the posted speed limit, we would get that car that would go twice as far with the same amount of fuel. What if we decided that those people next door really were neighbours, and we started treating them as if they might be friends. What would happen if we allowed our lives to be driven, not by the stuff we own, but by the stuff we can give?

Just think about it.