I finally did it. I finally was able to put my finger on exactly what’s bugging me about this particular Holiday season.
In case I haven’t been perfectly clear on this, I’m a stickler for calling things by their right names. While I give nicknames to family members and parts of my house (ever since the Simpsons our garage has been “the car hole”) it’s always done tongue in cheek, after we’ve all accepted the right name for a thing.
And that’s what’s bugging me this year. As I mentioned earlier, the husband and I watched an HGTV one-hour special about Decorating Disney World for The Holidays. There was a segment about giant trees. A segment about giant gingerbread houses and carousels and even a gingerbread town.
There was nothing about any giant menorah or giant kinara or giant hourglass.
My point is that they were clearly talking about Christmas. Clearly. Not about every holiday that happens in December.
Now I see two things wrong with this off the bat.
The first thing is that “Holidays” has become a euphemism in many people’s vocabulary. It seems to mean “well, we’re talking mostly about Christmas and New Years, but we’ll say ‘holiday’ so no one is offended.” It’s imprecise and has a sort of faux-openness about it. Because Disney World is not the only place where they say Holidays but mean Christmas.
And that’s the second thing wrong with it. That faux sense of inclusion that happens. As though by simply changing the name from Christmas to Holidays we won’t offend Jewish people or Islamic people or Atheists or Pagans. There is no other way in which many of the users of the word Holidays tries to accomodate those who actually observe the non-Christmas holidays. Well, I suppose the Pagans have it easier than most. They can just re-coopt (?) the trees and the yule logs and the lights and the–well, pretty much everything that we use for Christmas except a creche. But Jewish people maybe get some chocolate coins and a menorah if they’re lucky. I don’t know enough about Kwanzaa or Islamic observances to know what they don’t have–but the fact that I don’t know about it proves my point. It isn’t pervasive enough to be observed by the Celebrators of Christmas. But we still call it The Holidays. Like everyone really is included.
And they’re not.
It’s as imprecise as calling a vulva a vagina or referring to the entire abdomen as “the stomach”.
So I wish we would just get over this fake niceness and admit that we aren’t as hail-fellow-well-met as we’d like to think. Perhaps we should try to be nicer. In the spirit of the holidays.
I mean this in a purely platonic way, but your language compulsion is totally adorable.
Not to get too far afield (I think I pretty much agree with the gist of the post), but I am almost the exact opposite. I love reading tone and body language and other factors like sentence context to try to decode what someone is actually telling me. Perhaps it’s because I grew up in Nashville, where directness is considered rude.
It occurred to me that your health situation, which prevents a lot of face-to-face conversation, means that most of your conversations are through written word or telephone – meaning you aren’t exposed to a whole lot of non-verbal communication. Therefore, it becomes of the utmost importance that words have a specific meaning. Am I close on this?
Of course, it’s probably asking a bit much of any major corporation, especially one that has Disney’s reputation, to NOT use euphemisms. They have whole departments devoted to their use. Have you ever read their guests with disability literature?
I get what you’re saying and this is slightly off of your topic about the holidayS only encompassing the traditions of one holidaY, but reading through this, a new thought I hadn’t thunk (hehe) before occurred to me.
We hear alot from certain segments of the population that we need to stop taking “Christ” out of “Christmas” (never have heard any of these, mostly protestant, folks complain about taking the “Mass” out of “Christmas(s)” but that’s another story). These are the same people who most vocally oppose the term “Happy Holidays,” but I wonder now if in doing so they aren’t shooting themselves in the foot.
Perhaps “The Holidays” are about the general celebration that most people partake in this time of year, that even among most non-christian people involve the standard pagan-come-christian traditions and rituals (trees, presents, stockings, etc), leaving Christmas to actually describe the explicitly christian aspects of the season. If that is the case, then what is “Happy Holidays” actually doing if NOT putting “Christ” back into “Christmas?”
Slarti,
That’d be a good analysis, provided I had become this exacting only lately.
Which I haven’t. I’ve always been this way. I think it’s my winning (losing?) coin in the genetic lottery of having one parent be an attorney and the other a teacher. And both of them Midwesterners.
There’s a lot of “say what you mean, mean what you say” around my family.
Dolpin,
That’s been my point for years when I talk to Christians about the Keep Christ in Christmas. I actually like that there is a dividing line that is growing more apparent between what Slarti calls “consumer day” and what I call “Secular Christmas” or, increasingly, Yule, and the Sacred holiday of Christmas–which is really just a convenient retelling of Yule to fit the Christian paradigm. Which is fine with me–I like being able to find Christian meaning in all things. It’s–to me–part of “Everything old is made new in Christ”.
I’d just as soon let the World buy its presents and sing Holly Jolly Christmas and what not, while we in our way glory in the coming of Christ.
As i grow older I believe less and less in forcing our beliefs on people who haven’t come to them. I believe in SHARING but not FORCING. My Mennonite ways, I suppose.
So anyway, I guess I’ll just have to pretend that when they say “Holidays” they mean Christmas and Yule. But I still think that shortchanges the other solstice-related celebrations and alienates those who observe them.
[...] I have ever known to say “Happy Holidays” is either trying to be politely inclusive or trying to look as if they are trying to be politely inclusive. I’ve never known anyone–and I know a lot of non-Christians–to say “Happy [...]