How weasel words can create a merry old mess

Side-stepping the name of the holiday you are celebrating doesn't make much sense.

Show business, for fascinating and historically complicated reasons, has always held great appeal to Americans of the Jewish faith. From its earliest days, Hollywood has been a place for entrepreneurs and self-made types. The Boston-New York establishment around the beginning of the last century was bigoted and snobbish, and the go-getters who started the film business –Louis B Mayer, Adolph Zukor, Jack Warner, men like that – weren’t welcome in the white-shoe law firms and Episcopalian investment banks on the east coast. So they did what ambitious young men always do: they headed west.

The result is that there are an awful lot of folks in Los Angeles who, in December, celebrate Hanukkah as opposed to Christmas.

That’s why, for as long as I’ve been in the entertainment business – and it’s really none of your business how long, exactly, that is– I’ve been careful to give all of my colleagues and associates a cheerful and hearty non-committal and ecumenical poly-faith greeting in December.

Here’s the problem: December, for Christians, means Christmas. For Jews, it means Hanukkah. So most of us, to avoid trouble or hurt feelings, have resorted to a kind of mealy-mouthed greeting, something along the lines of “season’s greetings”, which means, essentially, “I hope you’re having a happy whatever it is you celebrate around now”.

Like most such tripwires in American culture, it’s hard to imagine anyone being truly offended by a greeting that comes from another religion. I’m a Christian – or, at least, I try to be – and if someone wished me a happy Hanukkah, or Eid Mubarak, or anything else for that matter, I’d be charmed. And I’d wonder if that meant I was about to get some kind of gift. (That’s what I meant by “I try to be” a Christian: good Christians aren’t supposed to be constantly on the lookout for gift-receiving opportunities.)

Still, in contemporary America, it’s better to play it safe. So most of us mumble some kind of barely grammatical phrase – I’ve heard “happy seasons”, which is meaningless; “all the best for the seasontide”, which manages to sound both incoherent and drummed-up by some awful public relations firm; and my personal favourite, a loud “merry merry!” which a hostess once trilled in my direction with such confidence that I was in my car on the way home before I thought to wonder, “merry what?”

For interfaith families, the whole month is a minefield of competing sides of the family, home-decoration battles and exhausting feasts.

An agent I know, who comes from a proud and long line of observant Jews, made a tragic mistake (his words, not mine) and married an Irish Catholic lady with nine siblings. Hanukkah is barely over – and sometimes it even overlaps – before the Christmas observances have begun. The family races from temple to church to choir practice to shul. His children, he says, end the month pale, overfed and confused. He calls it “post traumatic holiday stress syndrome”. They’re shell-shocked until the spring, when Easter rolls around. But of course, Easter happens a few days after the Jewish holiday of Passover, so the cycle repeats itself. His oldest teenager, he told me, has surrendered and declared that she is a Buddhist.

But here’s the good news. Every 70,000 years or so – and this year is one of them – the calendar of Jewish holidays and the calendar of Christian holidays are wide apart. This year, thanks to the lunar phases, Hanukkah is already wrapped up. It coincided with the American holiday of Thanksgiving, which is about as secular a holiday as you can imagine.

The problem now is, wishing someone a “happy seasons” or something equally vague this year seems passive and cowardly. There really is only one major holiday between now and the new year, and that’s Christmas. The only logical greeting, then, is a hearty “merry Christmas” with no looking back. The only folks who could be offended by that are the kind who would probably be offended by anything. This is a perfect moment, then, to break the horrible pattern in American culture of weasel-wording every single utterance.

I mean, you’d think – but you’d be wrong, at least in my case – that I’d just sent out dozens of holiday greeting cards each emblazoned with the safely pagan image of a holly branch and the words “season’s greetings”. Maybe in another 70,000 years I’ll try again.

Rob Long is a writer and producer based in Los Angeles

On Twitter: @rcbl