Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays

Posted by blog master Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Image by Burnt Pixel via Flickr

The Puritans briefly and unsuccessfully tried to ban the celebration of Christmas, but the New World enthusiastically embraced the holiday in ways both religious and secular ― especially secular.

Economists now scrutinize the mad rush of shopping from Thanksgiving to Christmas for signs pointing to the direction of the greater economy as a whole and to the animal spirits of the consumers who drive 70 percent of that economy.

Even without the blizzard that snowed out two critical days of pre-Christmas shopping in the Mid-Atlantic this has been an economically down year.

There are positive signs at the levels of inventories, producer prices, quarterly GDP figures but not by the yardstick most Americans measure the economy: ``If I lose my job, can I quickly get one that's as good or better?" The answer, sadly, is no, not really.

In a curious way, this has had its beneficial side. Americans are trimming debt, saving more, spending less and paying cash when they do, traits that seemed almost laughably quaint, at least until the heady days of the boom came to a crashing halt at Christmas a year ago.

It's purely an anecdotal and subjective view but the chastened times seem to have lowered the temperature on the pernicious ``War on Christmas," the belief that sinister forces are seeking to do to Christmas what the Puritans couldn't.

You hear less about boycotts of stores where an employee had the bad judgment to greet a customer with a cheery ``Happy holidays" instead of, as the dogma of cultural warriors requires, ``Merry Christmas."

Perhaps there's less of the wrangling of where the town Christmas tree will stand in relation to public buildings when, for economic reasons, the cash-strapped town may not have a Christmas tree.

A reader wrote to the Washington Post objecting that the paper had appropriated the Christian Advent calendar for a secular calendar of ``Holiday Happenings."

Normally this would have elicited a vituperative exchange, but the two published letters took rather scholarly looks at Christmas' origins in Roman celebrations surrounding the solstice. The harshest admonishment was to give Santa a break.

The message of Christmas, as expressed by Luke, is quite simple, ``Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men."

The politically fastidious may quarrel with the reference to the deity and the use of the masculine plural but not with the peace and goodwill part. It's not allowed. It's Christmas.

source:http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/opinon/2009/12/137_57801.htl