No need to tone down Christmas greetings

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/12/2023 (654 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

DAYS ago at a Christmas party I bumped into many old friends of mine and we wished each other Merry Christmas. One of them wished me a Happy Hanukkah.

No, I was not offended. That would be ridiculous. My heritage is Jewish. But his choice of words, not unlike the choice made by so many people with a Christian heritage, also borders on the ridiculous, and dare I say it, woke. My friend is among the growing tide who don’t want to hear themselves saying the words Merry Christmas. To nearly everyone else others at the party who, just like him, had been raised with Christmas traditions, they received those two generic words that have now become part of our politically correct tradition, “Happy Holiday.”

Now I am not here trying to be the Grinch of political correctness or wokeness. My purpose is not to declare myself the chief of the Christmas police. I am not advocating for a law that people should be required to say the word Christmas when they greet each at this time of year. But on that night in Winnipeg, at that party, a kind and decent person, who will always be my friend, turned on the Christmas tree bulbs in my head.

Canada is one of the most diverse societies in the world. That’s undeniable. Many public people have gotten applause for using the words “celebrating diversity.” The truth is this country is one of the most generous in the world at acceptance and some would say celebrating all cultures, heritages and faiths. I know that there is an industry of experts who spend every waking moment trying to prove to us that Canada is at its very core, a racist country.

This is a free country and they can keep selling that. I am not buying. What I did buy as a child growing up in Canada was that most of the people who came here from all over the world, with the important exception of Indigenous Peoples, were from Christian cultures. And that included me. My heritage may be Jewish. But my birth certificate refers to my first name as my Christian name. Why would that be? Because I was born in a country steeped in Christian culture — Hungary. My parents were raised in that culture. Did they and their families pay a high price for being members of the Jewish minority in the 1940s? No human being could pay a higher price than seeing most of the members their families and extended families murdered in the Holocaust. In 1941 Hungary, more than 800,000 Jews lived among more than eight million Christians.

Four years later there were 565,000 fewer Jews. I don’t do data charts in my columns because I look at them as personal letters, personal emails to you. The reader can do the squalid math on the Hungarian chapter of the Holocaust without graphics. More than half a million Jews, which included hundreds of thousands of children, did not die of the flu.

I am not unaware of my heritage. I was surrounded by too much Holocaust survivor guilt to not not know where I come from. I don’t deny that any more than I would deny the Holocaust itself. But none of the horror allows me to deny that I was a born in a Christian culture and given a Christian first name. For the reader who is wondering whether I also have a Jewish first name. Yes I do. It is Yosef. I was named after my paternal grandfather, whom I never got to meet because Hitler met him first.

In 1957 when my parents and I landed in Canada, as refugees from authoritarianism, we were highly aware that we were being given our freedom by another predominantly Christian culture. My father and I never hesitated to say Merry Christmas to our customers. They said the same to us. I know that my father never felt violated. He told me the fascists who put his parents and siblings on the train to Auschwitz never greeted them with a Merry Christmas. In our current climate nobody says “Happy Holiday” to a Jewish person during Hanukkah or a Muslim person during Ramadan. The same goes for Sikh and Hindu traditions and all the others that aren’t Christian.

I don’t need to be a Christian to wonder why in a country that celebrates diversity, Christians are told to tone it down. If we could cork that quirk, Christmas would be a much happier holiday.

Charles Adler is a longtime political commenter and podcaster.

charles@charlesadler.com