Happy Holidays everyone and a Happy New Year. I know people take offense to this, but fuck if I care.
The only issue I have with not saying Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year is that is sounds much better than Happy Holidays. For one, ‘merry’ is just a great word. It makes me think of a time when people said ‘fellow’. When the things you bought in stores were wrapped in brown paper and twine.
But, I also realize that the world is a different place. In the mind of many, that change is because of people. Whether it’s an influx from Southern Italy, Syria or Sierra Leone there will be people who complain.
What mystifies me is how I can go from talking about a holiday greeting to immigrants without seeming illogical or unreasoned.
The change from Merry Christmas to Happy Holidays is a supposedly bad one. But, unfortunately for the myopic among us, the world has not always been Christian – it has never, ever, ever been entirely any one religion. But, North America and Europe were predominantly Christian for the past hundred years.
We still are, folks. I think Canada’s three largest religions are different forms of Christianity, then it’s atheism, then Islam, Hinduism and the others do battle for the remaining percentage points.
But, suddenly, the great Companies of the Americas have begun saying Happy Holidays, I think this is what scares people. For many, a Company is like a parent. It tells them how to dress, eat, feel and even who they can have sex with. I mean just look at all the controversy in 2017 over the gay and interracial couples we see in commercials. What’s going on many might wonder?
It’s like your dad stopped going to Trump rallies and instead took up ganja and started dating a dude. What the fuck is happening right?
It IS overly simplistic but we need to stop taking everything so seriously. Starbucks changing their cups is nothing but a sign that a Company is trying to make more money. It has nothing to do with religious freedoms or anything else. Any action a Company makes is for its continued financial success. I don’t know why people act like this isn’t the case.
It wasn’t the Sicilians who made it so that store-wrapped boxes, wooden crates of Coca-cola and things like that went the way of the dodo. It was the Company which exploited the labour of the people who’d been pushed into segregated communities by well-meaning WASPs.
I have seen first-hand how easily everything is lopped onto some group of people with so little of their own that they can carry it on their back. Do you really think Syrians are going to go through a harrowing journey to escape their generations-old homeland just to come here and piss you off?
This is actually a curiosity of mine, and I hate to admit it because it removes the humanity from people. Also, exactly how much agency and ability to radically change culture do refugees have? Not much. Companies on the other hand….
But anyways, I think if people just focused on ya know, people and took a deeeeepppppppppp breath before we screech and squawk about things we’ve only thought about when our own lives, actions, fall short we’d do much better.
-Clay
Clayton Tomlinson 