People fight over everything these days, especially around Christmas. These days "happy holidays" are fighting words for Christians who fear that people are trying to secularize their national holiday. Christmas is a national holiday by law.
Letters start to arrive at the local newspaper The Wichita Eagle, slamming those in businesses who won’t say "Merry Christmas" instead of "Happy Holidays."
They fight over Xmas vs. Christmas. They think the X is an attempt to secularize their holiday. This is wrong. According to Wikipedia, the "X" actually comes from the Greek letter Chi, which is the first letter of the Greek word for "Christ."
One of the biggest problems for modern conservative Christians is that they live in a country where an increasing number of non-Christians practice their religion. Everyone knows that Hanukkah is a jewish holiday that happens to come around the same time as Christmas. There are pagans, wiccans and some agnostics who celebrate the Winter Solstice and they customs are mostly the same as Christmas. The Winter Solstice comes a few days before Christmas. Some Bhudists feel they have the right to celebrate any religious holiday with their family. There is a growing Muslim community and they are often met with hostility from conservative Christians. A good example was the presure put on Lowe’s to pull its ads from the TV show All-American Muslim.
The bottom line is that this is a country of different religions, some celebrate our national holidays and some don’t. For those who celebrate Christmas, or a similar holiday in the same season, this is a good time to respect those of different beliefs and celebrate what makes us alike rather than obsessing with forcing beliefs on others.
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