In The Faith - A Chronicle of the Christian Faith

Is Christmas too “Christian?” or the “Bah, Humbug” effects of political correctness.

TORONTO A few years ago, while working on an article, I spent a day with a group of teachers. Somehow – we may have been discussing the present continuous tense – the sentence “Christmas is coming” ended up on a blackboard. From there, one of the teachers asserted that using this sentence in a classroom would be “culturally insensitive.”

Why? I asked, pointing out that we hadn’t written, “Christmas is coming and your holidays pale by comparison!”

Now that would be culturally insensitive, I said.

No one laughed.

I thought about this when, a couple of years ago, the mayor of Toronto referred to the towering, decorated pine in the city center as Toronto’s “Holiday Tree” – to much derision.

I thought about it again when I read this month that some Macy’s stores are removing their traditional “Merry Christmas” signs and replacing them with supposedly more inclusive greetings such as “Happy Holidays.”

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