This is almost as good as sending that "Happy birthday to this future president" tweet around every October. It was 2018 when GQ correspondent asked people to please stop wishing her a Merry Christmas. The tweet was accompanied by a piece entitled, "Please don't with me 'Merry Christmas': It's impolite and alienating to assume I follow your religion."
She wrote:
Christmas is a lovely holiday, but it is definitely not a secular one. It is a celebration of Christ, as its very name implies. As a Jewish person, I have zero problems with your celebrating the birth of a person you believe is God’s only son, who grew up to die for your sins. I don’t share your faith, but I don’t begrudge you the joy of your celebration. In fact, I often participate, as I will this year when I bring Christmas presents wrapped in Christmas paper to a Christmas dinner with my friends and their sweet children. There’s no problem here: We know, respect and celebrate each other’s differences.
…
To say it’s off-putting to be wished a merry holiday you don’t celebrate — like someone randomly wishing you a happy birthday when the actual date is months away — is not to say you hate Christmas. It is simply to say that, to me, Julia Ioffe, it is alienating and weird, even though I know that is not intended. I respond: “Thanks. You, too.” But that feels alienating and weird, too, because now I’m pretending to celebrate Christmas. It feels like I’ve verbally tripped, as when I reply “You, too!” to the airport employee wishing me a good flight. There’s nothing evil or mean-spirited about any of it; it’s just ill-fitting and uncomfortable. And that’s when it happens once. When it happens several times a day for a month, and is amplified by the audiovisual Christmas blanketing, it’s exhausting and isolating. It makes me feel like a stranger in my own land.
Her own land? Sounds like colonization to us.
On the contrary — we think it's polite to wish people Merry Christmas. You don't have to assume someone follows your religion to wish you a happy December 25. Instead of feeling alienated, you can indeed just say, "Thanks, you too," and move on with life.
Americans have given up a lot to placate woke culture, but we're not giving up on this.