A holiday gift like no other

While Jerry Falwell and followers continue to kvetch over the increasing use of “happy holidays” to replace “merry Christmas,” I’m reminded of a kvetch that was more popular when I was a kid. And I’m left to wonder whether hypersensitive types forgot how affronted they once were by the term “Xmas.”

Christians have been saying “happy holidays” for years. The holidays they referred to did not include Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or any other slight nod of realization that theirs was not the only fete in town. No, the “holidays” was an acknowledgment of the fact that Christians were celebrating not one but two big back-to-back events: Christmas and New Year’s.

Back then, “happy holidays” didn’t seem to offend anyone at all. “Xmas,” on the other hand, was seen by many as a slap in the face to the baby J himself -- an erasing of the holiday’s very namesake, possibly the evil work of some dark anti-Christian conspiracy.

What else could explain replacing Jesus’ name with the anonymous, all-eradicating X?

Well, I recently stumbled across a little fact that puts these suspicions to rest once and for all. The X in Xmas is not a generic place filler, not a replacement of “Christ.” It’s an abbreviation of “Christ.”

That little X is really the Greek letter “chi” -- the first letter of Jesus’ name in the Greek.

Abbreviation? Yes. Eradication? No.

Because it only took me 30 years to settle that dispute, I’m free to tackle the current one: the use of “happy holidays” to replace “merry Christmas.”

Apparently, back when my “Xmas” revelation was timely, many mom-and-pop stores would send their smiling customers out the door with a hearty, “Merry Christmas!”

Of course, on the other side of town, other mom-and-pop shops bade their customers, “Happy Hanukah!”

But everyone knew what they were getting into.

Fast forward a couple of decades and there’s a raging debate swirling around Wal-Mart’s dictate that its employees opt for the all-inclusive greeting.

As Wal-Mart spokesman Dan Fogleman told the San Francisco Chronicle, “With 130 million customers walking through the door and 1.3 million employees, it’s safe to say there are a lot of different faiths out there.”

So I was just thinking: Perhaps all those people who are upset by the “happy holidays” business might do better to get upset about all those long-gone mom-and-pop shops.

Of course, as a small-time columnist, I can’t imagine what it’s like for huge organizations to have a single word choice nitpicked once every couple of decades. Me, I get it every day.

Take for example Steve in La Crescenta, who criticized me for using “like” in place of “as” in a recent column. As a defender of informal speech, I stand by my choice. But if you want to pick nits, Steve is right.

“Like,” we read in “The Elements of Style,” governs nouns and pronouns. “As” governs phrases and clauses. “The stable smells like flowers,” but, “The stable smells good, as a stable should.”

For those who like their answers jargony, this means that “like” should usually be considered a preposition, and prepositions introduce objects.

But be careful, “like” is still correct in, “Like most people, I celebrate Christmas” and similar setups. That’s because here it’s acting as part of an adjective, called a “prepositional adjective.”

But if, like me, you sometimes use “like” where the rules say to use “as,” take heart.

On replacing “as” with “like,” grammarian George Philip Krapp wrote, “Indefensible it certainly is not.” He added, “a widespread custom of speech, it has arisen naturally the same way that ‘as’ has.” Grammarian C. Dale Whitman in 1974 agreed. “ ‘Like’ is widely used as a subordinating conjunction in colloquial and popular speech.”

So even grammarians say it’s OK to use it like most people do. Consider that a little gift you can put right under your holiday tree.

* JUNE CASAGRANDE is a freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].

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