Happy Holidays??

My wife and I were in WalMart the other day and I was looking over a shelf of Christmas cards -- except I didn't see any that actually said "Christmas." It was all "Season's Greetings" and "Happy Holidays." And certainly none of them had any of the traditional Christmas icons -- manger, shepherds, Baby Jesus, etc. In fact, it's really hard to find a religious Christmas card outside of a Christian book store.
Marketers are responding to a perception that specific religious identification is no longer a Good Thing in our pluralistic society. Underneath is the prejudice that self-identified religious people are intolerant and bigoted, and that religious convictions produce social conflict. Therefore, Christmas will become a generic seasonal holiday, without any specific religious reference.
Two issues with this. First, as the traditional Christmas story becomes more marginalized, the space it leaves is filled by every more conspicuous greed and consumption. The religious meaning of Christmas at least kept it somewhat anchored in the Christian virtues of service, compassion and self-giving. But that is being muscled aside by truly aggressive consumerism. It strikes me as a real irony that in our public education system, no one really questions the promotion of Santa Claus (whose sole reason for existing is to promote Christmas spending) but kids must be protected against the destructive effects of anything resembling Christianity, even though the Christmas story is about the entering into time of divine, self-giving love.
The second issue is that, as Reginald Bibby's research shows, three out of four Canadians still identify themselves as Christians. For them, the Christmas story is THEIR story. And, to put it in terms our culture understands, there must be a pretty robust market for things like traditional Christmas cards.
I don't think the desacralizing of Christmas is entirely a response to a cultural change, I think that to a certain extent it's a deliberate strategy to create that cultural change. The Gospel of peace and divine love embodied in Jesus is being sidelined, because, if people really took it seriously, our culture would be challenged to its roots. And we can't have that.