Happy 'time off work in the winter to be with
your family and do various ritualistic stuff'

Just having started my blog, it's already time for me to go on hiatus … for the holidays.

The "holidays."

By now, how many times I have been told to have a happy holiday! Just as many times I have wanted to say: "May I have a happy Fourth of July?"

I'm glad that we, in the ever-diversifying United States still agree on the universal use of the word, "weekend." Otherwise, we'd constantly be answering the question, "How were your two consecutive days of non-accountability?'"

The other day I found myself in an e-mail work discussion with three colleagues. As we were wrapping up, somebody in the group expressed his or her desire for the rest of us to have a "happy holiday."

The thing was, everyone in this e-mail daisy chain was a Christian.

Well, depends how you define Christians. We were sort of City Christians.

One grew up Catholic and hates the Catholic Church. Another grew up Catholic and doesn't talk much about the Church. A third doesn't talk about religion at all, but I'm 99 percent sure she's not Jewish or Muslim or anything else, so I assume she is, as my less urbane pals from Cleveland would say, "regular."

And I am an agnostic, a position I take in rebellion to my strict atheist upbringing. But because I grew up in a WASPy suburb, it's Jesus who I'm not sure whether I believe in. And so I am also "regular." And being regular, I celebrate Christmas.

I have no quarrel with the pumping up of Chanukah, a minor Jewish holiday, to make Jewish kids in America not so jealous. And I know people who take joy in celebrating Kwanzaa; you'd never know it was invented in the 1960s by a college professor.

I am so liberal, I would accept a Gay Winter Holiday. (Though, what would you wish them? I suggest, "May your Gay Winter Holiday live up to its title.")

People ought to celebrate just what their family and other immediate social pressures force them to celebrate. Because of course it is mindless ritual and tradition that gives holidays their meaning. (For Christians, that happens to be going into debt in order to give our friends and family things they do not particularly want. Yes, I can see how some people might want to do something different.)

But somehow, I am offended by this "happy holidays" crap, however much a modern social necessity it may happen to be. It seems prissy. It seems bland. It seems cowardly. It eats away at me, happy holiday by happy holiday, until … until … until I snap.

And so I composed an e-mail to my little group of Christian colleagues.

I wrote, "Screw 'Happy Holidays.'"

I wrote, "Merry Christmas."

I pushed "send."

It felt great. It also felt wrong. That's a shame.

But now I'm on a rampage.

Merry Christmas.

Happy Chanukah.

Happy Kwanzaa.

Happy New Year's.

But as for "holidays"? You can have them.

Peace to all and back at you Jan. 3,

DM