Senator Chris Buttars wants the Utah Legislature to pass a non-binding resolution encouraging retailers to say "Merry Christmas" instead of "Happy Holidays." Ignore, for the moment, that there is almost no point whatsoever in passing any kind of non-binding resolution. Ignore also the obvious First Amendment issues that people will insist on bringing up.
Buttars says "I'm sick of the Christmas wars—we're a Christian nation and ought to use the word." So, first question: what makes us a Christian nation? Ignore, for the moment any of the arguments that we are not that may come into your mind. This country is a Christian nation because, by and large, the people who founded it were Christians of one or another stripe. As every school child is taught, our founding fathers came to the New World from England to escape religious persecution. The thing is, one reason the English couldn't stand our pilgrim forebears is that they kept trying to ban Christmas. As good protestants, they knew Christmas to be an evil mixture of papacy and paganism. Christmas met with little enthusiasm in the United States until the nineteenth century when Irish and German immigrants brought their love of it with them.
If it weren't for the Puritans' utter loathing of Christmas, America as we know it might never have come to be. And any talk of America being a Christian nation can be discounted by one glance at our relationship with Christmas—we're a Capitalist nation and have been so proudly since the nineteenth century descendants of this country's Puritan fathers overcame their distaste for the holiday when they discovered that Christmas actually made quite a workable excuse for picking the pockets of their Irish immigrant workforce every twenty-fifth of December.
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