Holiday Absurdities

'Tis the season for over-spending, over-glitzing, over-eating, over-drinking and now, over-reacting. The Christmas/Holiday debate launched by knucklehead Bill O'Reilly and his conservative Christian followers was amusing for awhile. I'm not a Christian, but I carry enough Catholic DNA to know that putting the "Christ" back in "Christmas" involves more than playing with words. You can bemoan the more inclusive "Happy Holidays" greeting all you want, but if your car is sitting in the parking lot at Wal-Mart and your kids are whining for an X-Box or an I-Pod under the tree, you done lost any "Christ" you thought you had. Clicking your heels and chanting "Merry Christmas" isn't going to bring back the true meaning of the day. I officially stopped being amused by this charade at 10:15 this morning when Greatest Husband gave a hearty "Happy Holidays" shout-out to our crew of housecleaners and was informed by the cleaning business's owner that she was "a Merry Christmas person." WTF? We now have camps? Since when is it acceptable to respond with rudeness to someone wishing you a happy anything? Apparently, the pea-brained among us (and there are plenty) have been emboldened by a language campaign that has convinced them to feel agrieved by a simple greeting, and they have no shame in responding with righteousness, ungraciousness and mean-spiritedness in order to make the point that they are Christian. What a perfect melding of actions and values. Christianity. Making the world a better place for more than 2,000 years.