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I am sick and tired of being told I'm a bad person if I say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" just because I want to respect people of all faiths.
That, itself, is NOT "political correctness" (I HATE THAT TERM!) but good manners.
And as a secular Unitarian who enjoys singing Christmas carols, attends Christmas Eve services, has a tree and Christmas lights and EVERYTHING, I feel as though Christmas is being stolen from ME. My Christmas is all about kindness, generosity, love, mercy, joy, and peace. While these are all Christian values, at least in theory, they don't require subscription to a particular faith--or any faith, for that matter, other than faith in humanity, which the Right Wing Noise Machine and its hordes of followers are sorely trying right now.
By insisting that Christmas must be all about the putative birth of a rabbi whose betrayal by his own religious leaders, politically expedient execution, and alleged resurrection--while entirely ignoring that rabbi's important, difficult, and possibly dangerously subversive teachings--they're basically saying that one isn't really entitled to celebrate Christmas unless one toes their dogmatic line. That people like Bill O'Reilly enable the sanctioning of rude, petty, vicious, uncivil behavior underscores the petty vicious mess they're making of the Christmas they're howling about protecting. What would Jesus do?
