Happy Holidays?

It has been my privilege to teach a number of international undergraduates at Southeast Missouri State University the last eight years. I've had in my classes students from Latvia, South Korea, Nepal, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, China and the Philippines. I'm appreciative of their efforts to speak and write in English, the only language in which I have any degree of fluency. One of my students told me the sheer number of idioms in regular usage make understanding English difficult at times.

An idiom is an expression having a meaning not deducible from the actual words. For example: "It's raining cats and dogs." If you've just read that sentence and it has been your experience to grow up on these shores, you know exactly what that collection of words means. But the idiom doesn't make any sense, really.

In the spirit of colorful idioms, I will use another, dear reader, and apply it to my chosen topic in this column.

To wit: I'm not sure why people vent their spleens (read: show anger) about employing the phrase "Happy Holidays" in conversation.

The following is a post I've seen more than once in my Facebook news feed this season:

"Don't wish me 'Happy Holidays!' It's 'Merry Christmas,' darn it!"

Somehow being ecumenical, being sensitive to the unambiguous fact that others may not share your faith (and according to the Pew Research Forum, 20 percent of Americans have no religious faith at all) is viewed as kowtowing to political correctness.

Happy holidays literally means "happy holy days." In other words, by its very etymology, to wish another "happy holidays" is to use a religious greeting. Maybe it is time to calm down here.

As an instructor in New Testament, it is instructive to realize that the birth of Jesus -- the historical occasion on which Christmas is based -- is mentioned in only two of the four gospels: Matthew and Luke. The others, Mark and John, have not a word about the event spawning Christmas. Those writers had other fish to fry -- ah, another idiom -- and chose not to include a birth narrative. Furthermore, Matthew and Luke do not agree on what happened or who was present. One account has shepherds taking center stage. The other has astronomers bearing gifts. One has the family returning to Nazareth after the birth; the other has them fleeing to Egypt to escape a genocidal King Herod. In our nativity sets, we conflate both stories into a succotash of irreconcilable details. We don't obsess over these differences because we understand they are stories.

The foremost writer of the New Testament, Paul of Tarsus, said nothing about Jesus' birth. In fact, he is famously quoted as writing -- although it is probable he actually dictated these words to a scribe who accompanied him -- "I am determined to know nothing among you but Jesus Christ and him crucified." (I Corinthians 2:2)

Paul wanted to make the main thing -- the main thing. Another idiom, perhaps?

Long story short as the New Year approaches, friends -- please accept my wish for you to have happy holy days, yes, happy holidays. For those for whom the expression also applies, Merry Christmas.