“Daddy, why do people say Happy Holidays in the store?”
“Well, because we are only going to see them probably once and that means Happy Thanksgiving, and Merry Christmas and Happy New Year all combined. Unless maybe you celebrate Hanukkah, then it’s Happy Hannukah too, so that’s just the shorter way to be polite and wish Happy Everything!”

That’s the true conversation I had with my father when I was about 7 years old in his store. As a small businessman, my father was meticulous with his manners and polite to the extreme. He taught us that the customers paid for our dinner and breakfast and school clothes. He taught us that you have to be polite to the customers if you want them to come back and continue to pay for those things.

Not only that- “Happy Holidays” taught me as a child to wish well to all people- even if they were different from me.

That certain people in this nation think to wish people a happy set of holidays is in someway a malevolent, thinly veiled plan to undermine their way of life is not only anthropocentric, but also extremely paranoid… almost to a comic extent.

I can imagine a red faced guy hiding in his basement window, (with the NRA decal), cracking a beer and telling his son, “That’s it, Billay- I kin see them librals cummin and thayz gonna trah to take away our plastic baby Jeezus. They’ve already outlawed the plastic jeezus in californie!”

Guess what?

The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought (Hardcover)

is on sale at amazon.com, down from 24.99 to 4.99.

Maybe people just aren’t “buyin it”.

Look, here’s the reality: some folks are trying to make Happy Holidays an issue for no other reason than to use fear as a tactic to influence people into behaving how they want them to behave. Don’t fall for it. When someone wishes you Happy Holidays, they really mean it. They really are wishing you are going to be HAPPY during this holiday season.

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You know, the season that includes many holidays? Okay? Great. So take a deep breath and don’t worry- there is no real plot- it’s just people trying to be nice. Nothing suspicious going on.

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