When I was a child, “Season’s Greetings” and “Happy Holidays” were common greetings in the world around me, in informal spoken language during the second half of December. They were not heard quite as frequently as “Merry Christmas,” but they were things people organically said. And they said these words with enthusiasm quite often. Their meaning was clearly not the same as “Merry Christmas” but the phrases were not understood by Canadians outside of conservative Christianity to be adversarial to “Merry Christmas” either.
In large measure, that was because they were about something positive. They did not, and have never, merely signified the mere avoidance of the term “Christmas.” Rather, they signified belief in something: the Cold War secularist civic nationalism we associate with the Great Society and the welfare state. Especially in Canada, where our welfare state arose the secularization of the Social Gospel movement and its leaders like Tommy Douglas, “Season’s Greetings,” was not simply a neutral expression. It signified belief in a project, the project of creating a liberal, universalist secular social contract that wove a thread through the churched and unchurched and through Christians and people of other religious faiths.
It was like our flag, our national anthem, our official multiculturalism, our welfare state. Sure, these things lacked deep cultural roots and were elite-driven projects handed down from on high but they appeared grounded in the ethos of reasonableness on which the great secular Anglo democracies of the twentieth century were culturally centred. One could comfortably say “Merry Christmas” and “Season’s Greetings” because they were complementary and compatible benedictions.
Of course, like so many aspects of white settler state liberalism, it actually concealed its own prejudices and cultural imperialism; fortunately, like many such prejudices of the age, they were relatively benign. Part of what held up “Season’s Greetings” and its friend “Happy Holidays,” was a major falsehood, a myth relentlessly propounded by the teaching profession, politicians and liberal religious leaders: that every major religious faith is like Christianity and that every religious tradition has two major annual festivals, one in the month following the vernal equinox and one in the two weeks surrounding the winter solstice.
Liberal secularists and neopagans like this myth for opposing reasons: liberal secularists like the idea that we are really just celebrating the climate, the seasons, the weather, that religion is simply an inefficient or nostalgic way of celebrating scientific laws and natural phenomena. Neopagans, one of the movements involved in the pernicious redefinition of “cultural appropriation” from the commodification and monopolization of cultural knowledge (as depicted in the Coen Brothers’ O Brother Where Art Thou? and dramatized by Monsanto’s patenting of basmati rice) to normal processes of cultural change and transmission, like this idea because it creates the false idea that Christians somehow stole the pagan festival Yule from Germanic pagans. Neopagans, being a white consciousness movement, if ever there were one, also share with atheists the dubious distinction of being the only people I have ever seen offended by “Merry Christmas.”
But the reality is, of course, that there is nothing universal about the there being two main religious festivals linked to the winter solstice and vernal equinox. Even North American liberal Judaism, the sole religion used to make this bold assertion, underwent significant modification to fit into this framework, elevating local observance the fairly obscure festival of Channukah above the far more significant festival of Yom Kippur.
Ironically, as we replaced our immigration with one that selected entrants based on class rather than colour, the obvious falsity of the universalist myth that every religion is excited about the vernal equinox became increasingly evident to us. And much of our enthusiasm for saying our secularist benedictions declined with it. We realized that we were not saying anything to our Muslim, Hindu or Sikh neighbours about their faith or seasonal experiences; we were just talking about the strange trip we were on.
Reactions to this came in a variety of forms: first, a growing negativity, a spirit of nullification, which had begun in the US, spread rapidly north. Lacking an ACLU and First Amendment of our own, we nevertheless imbibed a new kind of bitter American secularism, complaining about the violation of our non-existent separation of church and state (the first article of our liberal constitution is “the Supremacy of God” and our king is the head of a major Christian church). And so we began complaining about Christmas displays, songs and greetings receiving too much state sponsorship, being too permissible in public workplaces and other public settings.
And so we also borrowed the moronic idea that Christians saying “Merry Christmas” to non-Christians was some sort of injustice, injury or offense. Needless to say, people from venerable world religions were not offended, and often took the lead in saying it to us. No. The only people who seemed to be offended were neopagans and white atheists i.e. apostates from Christianity who constructed their religious identity in opposition to Christianity.
Another reaction was to attempt to astroturf new religio-cultural traditions that affirmed rather than contradicting the false premise of “Happy Holidays” universalism. Liberal churches, progressive school boards and other institutions dominated by liberal intellectuals invested heavily in the constructed festival of Kwanzaa, the black liberal secularist answer to Channukah.
The most pernicious reaction was proxy-offense culture, where identitarian whites take offense at people saying “Merry Christmas” to people of non-Christian faiths on their behalf. As I explained in my original series of essays on identity politics four years ago, proxy offense-taking is an important part of hierarchical honour cultures. Taking offense on behalf of a perceived sleight of one’s inferiors is central to maintaining and burnishing one’s identity as a powerful person in an honour culture like late eighteenth century Mexico, mid-nineteenth century Dixie or contemporary Coastal British Columbia.
The idea is that oppressed people lack both the knowledge and sophistication to be offended and the social capital to enact offense, even if they are. And so a crucial part of liberal white consciousness is taking offense on behalf of one’s inferiors, just as a lord might take offense on behalf of one of his servants if they were insulted on a public street in eighteenth century England.
In recent years, as the Pearsonian nationalist project was first betrayed, then hollowed-out, then inverted, all that remains is the offense-taking. And so, “Season’s Greetings” and “Happy Holidays,” have come to be perceived as combative slogans, as the precursor to a metaphorical duel in which today’s gentry, the commissar class, throw down a gauntlet, challenging their interlocutors to repeat back a meaningless and empty slogan or face the consequences.
Because I have been pushed out of Woke culture, I no longer even experience this. For the past two years, nobody has said “Happy Holidays” or “Seasons Greetings” to me at this time of year. Instead, “Merry Christmas” has made a remarkable resurgence as a greeting, one relished by both Christians and non-Christians alike. Because it turns out that moments of understanding and appreciating difference, of mutual recognition, of vicarious joy in others’ joy, of mutual agency are what bind a society together.
So I choose to remember 2024 as the year Canadians outside the Progressiverse, united in one small way: saying “Merry Christmas.” Arabs in keffiyehs said it; Zionists in yamakas said it; feminists supporting sex-based rights said it; Christians said it. And I say it: Merry Christmas.
