Who are these people? Has anyone actually ever heard from one of these people, or been chastised for saying Merry Christmas?

I'm not a very religious person, by any stretch of the definition, and this isn't what this rant is about. It's about traditions... what I remember as a kid, what made a difference to me, and how that's shaped me into the person that I am today. That would be: not very politically correct, not very religious, and the guy who always says out loud what everyone else is thinking but is too afraid to say.

A couple weeks back, I got an email from Head. Head's good for sending out emails that have six other nested emails attached to it, goofy pictures, naked pictures and generally funny stuff. I've torn some friends new assholes in the past over forwarding me crap and everyone knows not to clog up my inbox with FWD'd emails, lest they get blacklisted. Not Head though, he keeps sending, and I keep opening.

This particular email was a bit of a rant about Christmas. Not everyone celebrates Christmas, so therefore, NO ONE can. “It's not Christmas break, it's winter break...Isn't it amazing that it always occurs over the Christmas holiday? We've gone so far the other way, bent over backwards to not offend anyone, that I'm offended. It seems that no one has a problem with that.”

The rest of the email was an article copied from an editorial in a Toronto newspaper. It had a very Andy Rooney-esque feel to it, and ultimately said “This is our country, if you don't like it, leave” which is going a bit too far. I sent it to my friend Tina who was telling me just the day before that she was mad that people couldn't say “Merry Christmas” because it might offend someone.

A couple days later, one of the “most emailed” stories on Yahoo was about the uproar caused by the Parks & Rec dept of Boston renaming their “Christmas Tree Lighting” to the “Holiday Tree Lighting”. Being the instigator that I am, I sent the link to Tina, who blew a gasket.

Tonight, I found another log to add to the fire: Someone's posted up a segment of Larry The Cable Guy's “Non-denominational night before a winter holiday” piece from his stand-up routine that really emphasizes how far things have gone and how ridiculously out of hand they are.

Here in Cayman, everywhere you go it's “Merry Christmas and FUCK YOU if you don't like it.” :)

Im all about integration and multiculuralism. I even take with a grain of salt people who go out of their way to point out how multi-culturalist they are (that may not be a real word, but it is now) Just about everyone has ancestors that came from somewhere else. Some were four, five or more generations back, others are first-generation Canadians. When they came, whenever they came, they brought their traditions with them, and integrated them into what was already here.

Over time, as the population grew, those integrated, intermingled traditions all became woven into what we know as Christmas today (aside from all the commercial cosumerism bullshit that is, but that's another rant). I have absolutely no problem with people celebrating their own traditions, or picking and choosing from established traditions and adding them to their old-school traditions to produce something unique and meaningful to them. Over time, just like “our” traditions, they may become mainstream, too.

What I DON'T like, and what I think is wrong is to go somewhere and take things away because they aren't your own traditions. Put yours into the pot and give it a stir, but don't come into my kitchen, dump out my soup and start over beacuse it's not YOUR own recipe.

To paraphrase Tina, you don't see anyone emigrating to Israel and then saying “hey, I'm not Jewish, that menorah offends me...Can we just call it the candlestick instead?” All this leads me back to the original question, in the title of this post: Who are these people that take offense to being wished a Merry Christmas, and have you ever met one?