Holiday cheerless

It is not as if I hate the holidays. I enjoy the simply strung white Christmas lights along Kirkwood and eagerly await the special coffees available in December.

Sure, it is the season where everything gets colder and all the plants die, but people are cheerful and excited about all the gift giving and family time that’s coming up.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate the nature of the season, but I’m Jewish and Chanukah is just not that important of a holiday. Still, it’s “that time of year” and I’m celebrating, too.

So when someone is expressing his or her love for the season, it does feel a bit segregating when “Merry Christmas” is used as the generic season’s greeting.  
And now Focus on the Family, a faith-based group dedicated to “sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ with as many people as possible,” is trying to take away my right to join in the holiday cheer altogether.

The organization has founded a Web site called Stand for Christmas that is a “response to the secularization of Christmas and the trend of censoring public references to this time-honored holiday.” 

Essentially, they are trying to make sure that Christmas is the capital holiday.

The Web site allows for shoppers to provide feedback about their holiday experience at retailers like American Eagle, GAP, Best Buy, Wal-Mart and many others.

It then offers an “up-to-the-second” summary of how customers have rated these retailers across a spectrum of Christmas friendliness, negligence or offensiveness. A message board for posting comments about each retailer is available as well.

Focus on the Family seems to want Christians to have exclusive rights to this time of the year.

On its homepage they ask visitors to decide “which retailers are ‘Christmas-friendly.’”
“They want your patronage and your gift-shopping dollars,” the site points out, “but do they openly recognize Christmas?”

Isn’t this self-centered, Christian-centric thinking completely out of sync with what the holiday is supposed to mean?

For Focus on the Family and the visitors of Stand for Christmas, they are downright offended that Christ is not every retailers “reason for the season.” What is worse is that many of the comments left on the site suggest boycotting establishments that do not play Christian-themed Christmas music, do not have religious depictions or decor, or do not wish a “Merry Christmas” to patrons.

It is this kind of attitude that makes the season isolating to those who do not celebrate Dec. 25 as Christ’s birth.

Putting pressure on retailers to change their attitudes about the holidays to one that insists on Christmas is unfair to everyone else who doesn’t consider Jesus their savior.