Merry Christmas

I got my first “happy holidays” of the year today, and that means you get to hear my yearly exhortation on the matter, which is this: please just say Merry Christmas. I am a Jewish person and I’m here to say: it’s okay. It’s not mean or unfair that you have a big holiday at this time of year. It’s totally fine. The day is called Christmas whether you celebrate the religious birth narrative or not; it’s a federal holiday and that’s the name of it. You can say it, it’s totally fine.We all know that the holiday people really mean when they say “happy holidays” truly is Christmas anyway. Some folks are kind-hearted and fear that saying the word Christmas implies that the person they are saying it to also celebrates the same holiday. But it implies no such thing. “Have a good weekend” doesn’t imply the person hearing it works Monday through Friday. It just acknowledges that lots of people do have weekends off, including the speaker, and that lots of other people know that.

It would be silly to say, “I am grateful that there are days of the week that mean something to me, and I don’t want to say what it is, but I hope you have a day or days of the week that mean something to you so I can say something.” It’s the weekend. We all know what that means. It’s okay just to say it.

People sometimes say, “But it is a few different holidays close together”—meaning, Christmas and New Year’s, and maybe Thanksgiving too, even though that’s a whole month before. And it’s true, they are a week apart. But Halloween and Veterans Day are 10 days apart, and we never lump them together into a big fun-sized bag of “Thank you for your service and your candy.” Valentine’s Day and Presidents’ Day are even closer, often as short as a day apart, and yet we don’t give each other hearts that say, “Be my bank holiday.” So, it’s not really about that. Generous-spirited people just adopted that explanation in retrospect.

People also say, “But it’s not Christmas for everyone, and there are other celebrations at the same time.” That’s true too, but again…it’s not why people say “happy holidays.” If it were, they’d also say it in April, when Easter, Passover, and Ramadan often occur simultaneously. These are arguably far more meaningful, culturally, to the relevant celebrants, than the mishmash of December observances. Yet, we don’t even have a “christmahanukwanzakah,” the turducken of holiday wishes, for these April celebrations, let alone a catch-all watered-down way of referring to them all in the most archetypical manner possible.

No, this is not why people say “happy holidays.”

Can I tell you why we say it?

At some point in the last century, Christmas in the United States morphed into the Super Bowl of holidays. It wasn’t always thus. In fact, when the first European Christians squatted their pale, quail-fed Enlightenment Era buttockses upon this fine already-settled land, they prohibited the celebration of Christmas. They felt it was frivolous, secular, and non-pious. Which it was! Most of the traditions associated with the holiday—tinsel, ornaments, stockings, singing, small gifts—far pre-dated the story of Jesus’ birth and were just for kicks. For the first 350 years after Jesus’ death, they were still just an ongoing amalgam of winter solstice traditions, completely unrelated to the burgeoning new religion. In somewhere around 350AD, as the church was trying to expand the reach of its new religion, it made the decision to set Jesus’ birthday on the date of the existing cultural celebration, when people were carousing anyway, with the hope that it would entice more people to celebrate the religious birth story. Even then, there was a distinction made between the religious celebration of that birth story, and the cultural traditions of Saturnalia, Yule, and other pre-Christian winter solstice observances.

And it was pretty raucous back then too! It was not your grandma’s midnight mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The vibe was closer to Mardi Gras than to the Macy’s parade.

So, the Puritans wanted none of that in the “New World.” But during and after the Civil War, the cultural component of the Christmas commemoration was seen as a way to bring families together again, and to that end, it was designated a federal (that is, secular) holiday in the wake of the war in 1870.

Then, in the 1900s, some savvy marketers saw the potential to turn this family-focused federal holiday into a commercial opportunity. They bigged up the fat, jolly, hyper-caucasian gift-giving reindeer-wrangler and turned the presents into the centerpiece of the American version of the day. It’s been off to the shopping races ever since. Superbowl time.

Now, completely coincidentally, there is a holiday on the Jewish calendar that often falls around the winter solstice celebrations. It’s a minor holiday, something a bit like VE Day; it exists, it celebrates a victory, there are some traditions and meanings associated with it, but it’s not one of the biggies on the calendar. But one of those minor traditions is the giving of small gifts.

So Jewish kids in the last century watched their non-Jewish friends getting GI Joe with the Kung Fu grip, while they, the Jewish kids, got a piece of dry chocolate wrapped in foil it was impossible to get all of it out from. Eventually, the cultural pressure toward gifts shifted Hannukah, the minor Jewish December holiday, into something more like a “Jewish Christmas.” Runner-up Superbowl. The “other” halftime show counterprogramming Bad Bunny.

Soon, religious folks again began reasserting the holiday’s place as a religious commemoration—often without completely realizing that the day had never, even once in history, been non-secular, at least in part. That reassertion happened after the American commercialization had taken hold. This had the unintended—ironic—effect of making it seem like the cultural components, right down to the gifts, were all part and parcel of the religious one. It made it seem as if the Federal holiday of “Christmas” was the religious commemoration of Christ’s Mass. But it wasn’t and never was. Vice versa!

Sometime, toward the last half of the last century, that shift turned “Merry Christmas” into something religion-associated. That benign wish began to carry new weight and took on an implied asterisk: “Merry Christmas** or whatever Christmas-like thing it is that you unfortunate non-Christian folks are stuck with instead.” This is more nicely expressed as, “Happy [whatever] holidays [you might be experiencing, since we can’t tell by looking at you what that might be, and we don’t want you to feel left out of this good thing we have going]!”

Some folks now include Kwanzaa in that mental fill-in-the-blank, with the irony being that that Kwanzaa is explicitly a casting off of the commercial shackles of the commercialized Christmas celebrations, and instead an honoring of values rather than possessions/gifts.

But, stay with me. Christmas-the-federal-holiday, as opposed to Christ’s Mass the religious celebration, is everywhere. Ev. Uh. Ree. Where. If you’re a Jewish kid in this country, or an Amish kid, or a Jehovah’s Witness, or Hindu, or Muslim, Wiccan, Satanist…you know it’s Christmas. It’s literally the name of the day. The government is closed. Stores are closed. Tinsel abounds. People have reindeer antlers on their cars and walk around in Santa hats. Christmas, the winter-solstice celebration, has continued as an uninterrupted set of traditions, without interruption, from the time hundreds of years before Jesus was born, to now thousands of years after his death. It came to the US as a series of secular traditions and has continued as such since the country’s founding. We. Know. It’s. Christmas.

We are not feeling left out of anything. Those who weren’t brought up Christian aren’t excluded from wishes that use the word Christmas. If anything, the legalistic generalization to “holidays” makes it seem like you think we need a bone thrown to us poor non-Christmas-ians. That’s why “Happy Holidays” is such a bummer. It feels like pity. “All holidays matter.” Sure, but the one that matters today, the reason you are saying anything at all, is Christmas.

Also: I’m Jewish, but not religious. I can’t remember the last time I did anything religion-related for Hannukah. Maybe as a kid, or one year in college when my housemates were religious Jews. I can’t even tell you each year when it starts. So, it’s not my “holiday” this time of year, happy or otherwise. In fact, as a non-religious atheist, I’m far more bummed out at the assumption that I have a “holiday” —that is, that religion would be some kind of presumed natural state, which chafes at my psyche—than that you wish me a happy what-the-day-is-actually-called-whether-or-not-I-also-adopt-the-birth-narrative-on-top-of-it.

Think of it as you would your birthday. When someone wishes you a happy birthday, you don’t say, “Well, lots of other people have different birthdays, and some don’t celebrate birthdays at all, and also it’s National Kiss a Turnip Day and National Dandelion Appreciation Day, so it’s best just to wish me a day and let me apply it as I wish.” Nope. It’s your birthday, we call it your birthday because that’s what that day it is. Others do not crumble when we say it, they are not offended that it’s not their birthday too, they don’t feel left out or lesser than, they need no bones thrown to them as a result of it. You’re just calling the day the thing it is.

Don’t “all holidays matter” me, bro!

Exhortation over. I wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, and may you and those you love find happiness and peace in the coming year and beyond. I’m grateful to you for the time you spend reading my column and spinning my tunes. Send me yours, please, I will read/listen/look/like.

On the topic of music, here is my world-saddest-Christmas-song, probably no surprise there given the above. Give it a listen. Go forth. Celebrate. And if you see me, I promise that the way to make my “holidays” the happiest is to say, “Merry Christmas,” and trust that I know the spirit you mean it in. See you in 2026.

Josh Weinstein is an SDMA-winning songwriter, arranger, producer, and pianist/organist/keyboard player originally from New York. He holds a Ph.D. in music and teaches college and private lessons across a variety of disciplines. His dog is way cooler than he is.