Christmas has been on my mind lately, possibly because it’s less than a month away. I’ve been trying to decide what I want to call this time of year. In England this was never a problem, everyone called it Christmas and I never thought twice about it. We heard rumours that those silly Americans called it “the holidays” but that was dismissed as another one of those vulgar Americanisms.
Now though, I’m not so sure. Why should I keep calling it Christmas when I’m not a Christian? Why risk offending those with other belief systems? I’ve tried avoiding that by calling it Xmas, but Xmas comes from the Greek for Christ starting with X so that’s no good. I thought about referring to it as the Winter Solstice, but scientific as that might be, it has a definite new-age sound to it. So it looks like I’m stuck with “the holiday season” which is bland and ambiguous and has a similar effect on me as fingernails on a blackboard. Oh well.
