If you live in rural areas plenty of people tout the "bring merry Christmas back" mantra. The origin of the cups story may be one person but it's reflective of a larger group.
It's not clear to me whether this is the cause or effect though.
I don't know how to present this theory in a falsifiable way, but I get the distinct feeling that a lot of these culture war battles are conjured up out "weak man" arguments in a hyper-real manner.
Buzzfeed writes an article about how conservative nuts (more properly a single conservative nut) is boycotting Starbucks because there's no Madonna in their latte foam. Blue tribe clicks the article and laughs at Red Tribe for being so stupid. Red tribe clicks the article and decides "Blue tribe is laughing, at us!". Red tribe grifter starts accepting donations to buy Starbucks cups and throw them into a paper shredder. Blue tribe starts a Foundation for Freedom from Religious Latte Art demanding depictions of Satan in their lattes. Suddenly everyone has extremely strong feelings about something as absurd as whether or not there should be a Madonna depicted in their latte.
In many cases, it seems the original nut turns out to be someone who spent most of their life at reality TV auditions.
This is literally what the article is describing. It's worse than 'the other tribe is laughing at us.' It's, 'if i don't fight my battle here, even though I don't really agree with it, we'll lose the war'
That's why weakmen are super weapons. You have to use them. If you do look at your own tribe and say 'yeah that person is a loon' then you risk the whole tribe itself, and you can't have that.
There's a common theme in a lot of these "you can't trust what you see" replies that it's specifically being amplified by the liberal side, to make conservatives look stupid.
If you take that one step further down the sequence of events, though, we'd be aiming that critique at the Christian side of the media that's been making hay about the "War on Christmas" for decades. Find one person saying something, or one company doing something you can take the wrong way, use it to tell your audience they're under attack; lather, rinse, repeat. Growing up in it, I'd hear about this stuff in youth group, in chapel in school, even in not-officially-religious classes like History. Before the internet, it wasn't easy to escape that bubble if your parents were deep into it.
Or do posters here really think there really are a lot of people out there trying to eliminate Christmas?
I don’t think anyone thinks people are out to eliminate Christmas in the sense you seem to mean it, which is kind of the point. Or rather, I’m sure some people do, but they are rare and not representative of Christians in general despite the generalization.
To be clear there are people who take offense to the phrase “Merry Christmas”, which is what some traditionalists (Christian or not) take issue with, but no one is making a weak man argument about them either, i.e., no one says most people take offense to Merry Christmas.
I'm actually an atheist who likes saying "Merry Christmas", not that I really care very much. But the small sliver of people who'd be outraged over cups at a hipster coffee chain are not reflective of the broader group, is the point.
"the cups story may be one person but it's reflective of a larger group" is exactly the "weak man" fallacy/mode of group stigmatization that the blog post is about.
If someone chooses to say "happy holidays" rather than "merry Christmas" out of sensitivity or political correctness, that does not constitute cancelling. The term cancelling is usually used for deliberate and sustained social pressure and boycotting campaigns. As far as I am aware this has not occurred on any significant scale to try to stop people from saying "merry Christmas".
In the other direction, however, this has very much happened. Conservative Christian organizations have called for boycotts of companies who don't mention Christmas in their Christmas marketing (or, in some cases, even just for mentioning non-Christian holidays) repeatedly over the last two decades. [0]
To avoid weak-manning here: I'm sure this is a pretty fringe group and not at all representative of Christians in general. But it is clear that the campaign to force people to use traditional Christmas greetings and imagery has always been more prominent and aggressive than the campaign to abolish traditional Christmas greetings.
Many companies don't allow their employees to say Merry Christmas, because it could offend customers.
When you interact with public employees and 10 out of 10 say "Happy Holidays", it becomes a social norm. Breaking that norm then feels uncomfortable, and people who are already biased against Christians will seize the opportunity to say that Merry Christmas is insensitive.
You can only say that the messaging for "Bring Back Merry Christmas" is more aggressive - the tactics on the Happy Holidays side are certainly ruthless, because there's a profit motive behind it.
You can find that frustrating, but that doesn't make it cancelling. To be cancelling, it has to be a deliberately sustained campaign.
In this case, as you said yourself, it's just a plain and simple profit motive. Companies want as broad appeal as possible, so they instruct their employees to use neutral greetings. There is no intent there to destroy the traditional greeting, so it's clearly not cancelling.
We can certainly debate on the intent, but ultimately, the result is the same - no one says Merry Christmas anymore, and Christians are sometimes sad about this.
I think it feeds into the feeling of victimhood. It seems all-encompassing. Which makes these people sternly-pro-Merry-Christmas.
I don't know about the US, but I say "merry Christmas" to people I see before the 24th and that I will for sure see before the 1rst,and a "happy holidays" equivalent if won't met between the two days. Are you sure it's only profit motivated and not a will to be semantically correct?
I think this is so weird. I live in a "democrat-run city" to use a phrase popularized by the weird right, and people here say Merry Christmas if someone says Merry Christmas to them or they know each other from church, and say Happy Holidays if you don't know the holiday someone celebrates and they're not wearing a Christmas tree sweater. It's a pretty easy algorithm. I don't think anyone feels like Christmas spirit is lacking.
Your last few sentences are right: the people I know who are outraged about the war on Christmas are Christians of a certain type who feel like they have not received what has been promised to them. They're well-off, have houses built for them in nice new suburban developments, have a couple cars, don't seem like they're hurting for money or jobs, but they've just really got a chip on their shoulder about other people getting what they deserve.
I'm probably re-centering a category right now :) This was a very interesting article and it's fun to try to find all the examples of this I can.
You have every right to lament or protest a trend that you don't like, but by claiming you're being cancelled, you are making a very strong claim about intent ("they" want to destroy our tradition), one that you fail to back up.
That's not Walmart being politically correct though, it's Walmart being a commercial enterprise that has 1 preference (higher revenues).
They do other dumb things, like for a long time plenty of people wouldn't buy any music there, because they censored it. Here's the New York Times making a parallel argument to yours, 25 years ago:
Try replacing "politically correct voices" with a proper noun. Who specifically is it that tried to cancel Christmas? And if you asked them if they are actually trying to cancel Christmas, would they say yes?
We’re talking about the greeting, not Christmas in general. I don’t think it’s controversial that it’s considered rude now to wish a stranger Merry Christmas, but here’s a Huffington Post article that argues against it for just one example: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/happy-holidays-instead-of_1_b...
There are good reasons to know your audience before using the greeting, but it’s very rare to hear it at all in many parts of the US, which does seem strange when 90% of the country celebrates Christmas. Since Happy Thanksgiving and Happy Halloween are completely fine to say to a stranger I think it’s fair to say the greeting has been canceled, for better or worse, regardless of original intent.
> I don’t think it’s controversial that it’s considered rude now to wish a stranger Merry Christmas
Yes, its very controversial to claim that is the general view.
> here’s a Huffington Post article that argues against it
But…it doesn’t argue either against saying Merry Christmas or that it is “rude” to say it (or that anything is “rude”.) It argues that it is illegal (a form of workplace religious discrimination) for your boss to compel you to say it, outside of narrow circumstances where it may be a bona fide job requirement.
This confusion of arguments that being compelled by government, an employer, etc. to do X is improper and/or illegal with arguments that choosing on your own to do X is immoral, rude, etc. is sadly common.
“If you do celebrate Christmas, then please don’t forget that there are many other religious holidays being celebrated in December. Some of your customers and coworkers may not want to have Christmas shoved down their throats.”
It definitely might be clickbait but it was one of the first Google results. Clearly at least some people think the greeting is “shoving Christmas down their throats”
So, you've heard (from the right) that this is widespread opinion on the left, but when you looked at what the left says, you only found fairly minor voices expounding a somewhat weaker version of that claim? That sounds exactly like the 'weak man' thing we're discussing, doesn't it?
There are two views here, broadly, about canceling 'Merry Christmas':
a) it's a popular view on the left
b) it's not a popular view on the left, but some on the right have acted as if it is
View b) is equivalent to agreeing that this whole thing is an example of a 'weak man' argument, and a) is equivalent to disagreeing with it. I struggle to see how anyone could read camjohnson26's comments and conclude that they meant b). They cited a link as evidence of a) and complained when I suggested it wasn't persuasive.
I still don’t see where in the thread that anyone is suggesting that this is a “widespread” view. The parent notes that some people hold it, and we can imply that enough people hold it (and with enough collective influence) that businesses were coerced into changing their policies, but that doesn’t suggest any kind of majority or even a sizable minority. Indeed, the whole idea behind “tyranny of the minority” is that it takes only a very small minority to drive broad-reaching change in cases like these. I think one of us has misread the thread, but I’ve now triple checked and I don’t think the error is mine in this particular instance.
Then I beg you to read it a fourth time, because you've mixed up the two opposing 'weak man' claims:
1) The left saying: "Those silly righties are mad at Starbucks because they won't put Christmas decorations on their cups!"
2) The right saying: "Those silly lefties hate religion so much that they get mad if you tell them merry christmas!"
You started this thread by mentioning the first one. Someone replied to you that 'bring merry christmas back' was indeed a thing. Then camjohnson26 replied to them, saying "They wouldn’t feel like they need to bring Merry Christmas back if the overly politically correct voices hadn’t tried to cancel it in the first place."
Note that the first half of that (people trying to bring the greeting back) is a reference to weak man 1, and the second half (people trying to cancel the greeting) suggests that weak man 2) wasn't an exaggeration, it really happened. It is that latter half that I responded to.
Does the left think it enough to meet some arbitrary threshhold that allows us to call it 'widespread'? I dunno, that sounds totally subjective and semantic. Luckily that's not what we're arguing about (I just used that term as a short way of saying 'as widespread as the right has claimed'). What we are arguing about is: were the claims from the right about the left being against 'merry christmast' roughly accurate, or a big exaggeration? I claim the latter, and camjohnson26 (I'm fairly sure they would agree) was saying the former.
How many examples would I need to provide? Discounting this one as a minor voice is getting into “No True Scotsman” territory. And this was just the top Google result, definitely not the only result.
I'm a liberal, living in a very liberal city. I don't need you to tell me what the left thinks. Believe me, I've heard plenty of politically correct stuff from my side that I think is silly (and presumably you would agree). This just isn't one. You can go to a collectivist bookstore with BLM posters in the window, where the History section is labeled "Herstory," and still be wished a Merry Christmas by the person running the register.
You're welcome to disagree of course but this might be a good time to step back and remember where the goalposts started. You didn't set out thinking this was something you would have to prove with evidence. You said, "I don't think it's controversial that..." and then a bunch of people said it was.
In any event, I don't think it's super important; this seems like it is clearly an example of a 'weak man', because however strongly the left does or doesn't think it's rude to say Merry Christmas, it seems incontrovertible to say that Fox News presented us as believing it somewhat more than we do, and for the reasons discussed in the article.
> I don’t think it’s controversial that it’s considered rude now to wish a stranger Merry Christmas...
Strongly disagree. Also, the first sentence of the article you link kind of contradicts you here. Please consider the possibility that this is one of those ginned-up-for-clicks things.
I'm not American. And I'm an atheist. Are there actually people who object to "Merry Christmas"? This seems so bizarre to me, I always assumed it wasn't a real thing.
There are some (but not many people) who will get upset at you if you tell them "Merry Christmas". These are generally people who dislike Christianity or another, and/or whom dislike its pervasiveness in American culture over other religions.
Likely more prevalent are the people who don't like corporations, public services, etc. wishing everyone Merry Christmas year after year while ignoring the holidays of other religions.
To avoid all of this, many places are switching to "Happy Holidays", except there are a not-insignificant number of people who are upset by this and feel that companies/governments should be saying "Merry Christmas" because they should be aligned with Christianity.
Not really. Very nearly 100% of the examples of "objections" to Christmas are just people or corporations choosing to say "Happy Holidays" or something instead.
As in the OP, there's probably somebody you can point to who holds any dumb position you want to argue against, but there isn't really an anti-Christmas side of the public discourse in America.
What's worse: There are some people who celebrate Christmas but who choose not to wish others a "Merry Christmas" out of fear of offending them. Peak woke.
