Merry Hollypundia

If anyone has been on Facebook lately, or any other areas of social media, you may have noticed how it is being inundated by these huffy, offended, bad-tempered, over sensitive updates from people who are traumatized about what people are calling the holidays?  At first I was all “meh” about it and ignored them because frankly I don’t give a flying rat’s ass about it.  But lately it just seems like everyone is jumping on the whole say, Merry Christmas not Happy Holidays thing, and getting all hostile about it.   

Which got me wondering if in fact there actually is some kind of movement out there that I was not aware of which is pushing the world away from saying Merry Christmas and trying to make everyone change to the generic greeting Happy Holidays.  I’ve seen these posts a few times in the past few years but this year it just seems to have escalated and it piqued my curiosity, and being who I am I had to do some investigations into it.  My first step was to peruse the news links.  It turned up nada.  Then I checked out Snopes, which reports that this is an urban myth which has been circulating since the 1970’s and the fact is that the whole push to get the government to change the wording by nefarious atheist groups is a total fabrication.  I then checked out some of the more high profile atheist sites who I thought may actually advocate something like this and only turned up a few comments about Christians getting huffy about Christmas greetings.  Then I went to some of the Christian sites and bingo I hit jackpot, on some sites there is a veritable hornet’s nest of commotion about it.  So ultimately what I learned is that the people who are bitching and complaining about it the most, and making a big hairy deal out of it, are actually the ones who are creating the issue in the first place.   

Obviously the ironic aspect of the whole thing is that Christians actually don’t even have dibs on the season to begin with.  Long before Christianity this holiday has been celebrated for centuries by many different cultures and civilizations.  Many pagan cultures celebrated the winter solstice, the Feast of Juul was celebrated in Scandinavia, Saturnalia was celebrated by the Romans, the Wiccans called it Alban Arthan, the Mayan Indians honored the sun god they worshipped with a dangerous ritual known as the flying pole dance.  I could go on, but you get the picture.  So the next time someone gets their panties tied in a knot about the name you can wish them a Merry Hollypundia from the ancient Egyptians with a big helping of warm noodley goodness from the Flying Spaghetti Monster!