Happy Holidays

I was hoping to make it to Thanksgiving without having to issue another

CRITICAL PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT FROM YOUR AUNT SLUGGER

but it appears that we won't be able to make it that long.

Today, in the baking aisle at Stop & Shop, while I was trying my hardest to find regular gingerbread cake mix instead of that bullshit whole wheat variety, I overheard a man telling a friend that he is going to use the phrase "Merry Christmas" and not this "politically correct 'happy holidays' shit."

That's the spirit.

Now, your Aunt Slugger is not known for being the most sensitive person to grace this mortal coil, but I actually use the phrase "Happy Holidays" in situations where I do not know what a person celebrates. You want to know why? Gather 'round, kids, because Aunt Slugger is going to tell you a story.

The Slugger family is not a religious family, but we are a materialistic family, so we go hard at Christmas. I grew up in a Bible-intensive part of the country, so everyone I knew was also heavy into Christmas.

At age 17, your Aunt Slugger headed to college in a suburb of Boston. Your Aunt Slugger experienced extreme culture shock that year, because the school was 60% Jewish. Even though my paternal grandfather was Jewish, and my father was raised Jewish, the closest I came to experiencing Judaism growing up in my house was sprinkling kosher salt on an Easter ham.

As it turned out, attending a school with so many Jewish students had significant benefits to a non-religious person like myself, including days off for Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Shmini Atzeret, and Passover. (Hannukah, it happens, is not considered a major holiday in the Jewish faith, and the very religious Jews don't give large gifts for Hannukah. You're supposed to give practical gifts, like an umbrella or a protractor. It sounds like a terrible holiday. "Go big or go home" is my motto.)

At this school, non-Jews were in the minority. Not being an especially sensitive person, I didn't really care if someone assumed I was Jewish or assumed I was celebrating a Jewish holiday. Because, well, if you really think about it, we should all just be grateful when a stranger is wishing us well instead of trying to gun us down with an automatic weapon. But the same people who piss and moan about the trend toward saying "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" would probably launch a hand grenade at the first person to wish them a Happy Yom Kippur. (Not that there's anything happy about that morbid fucking holiday.)

So keep that in mind: If you wouldn't want someone to wish you a Happy Sukkot because you are not part of a religion that builds a temporary outdoor hut and eats all your meals in it for a week*, then don't assume people want you to wish them a Merry Christmas. It's that simple.




*This holiday usually falls in mid-October. Your Aunt Slugger tried to reconnect with her latent Judaism by eating in this hut a few times during college. Fuck my latent Judaism; the hut was cold.