Of course during this time of year the issue of whether to use a generic greeting: happy holidays, versus a specific greeting: merry Christmas, always seems to come up. This is what I've been hearing and doing lately.
Last Monday evening I taught a class at the University of Phoenix on Compensation, Benefits and Incentive plans. This is part of a five week human resources management course for bachelor's degree students. Because this was the last class prior to a two-week holiday break, I surprized the class with a pop quiz. The quiz was a Christmas trivia quiz - all about lyrics to Christmas songs and characters in Christmas movies.
The students tell me they all enjoyed the game-like quiz and they appreciated the 20 minute break from more technical and mundane studies. However, I have to admit that when planning the quiz I had second thoughts. Would any of the students be offended that the holiday providing the theme was a religious holiday - even if none of the quiz items was overtly religious? Would the University object to bringing this up in class? Should I ask the students if any of them wanted to be excused for the 20 minutes of the quiz? In the end I didn't ask - I just acted - and the students all seemed to have a lot of fun and so did I.
It makes me wonder if in the quest to respect diversity in everyone, I have become too worried about celebrating the commonalities that most of us (in my community at least) share.
My advice to others struggling with this would be to respect each individual, yet also get to know group, organizational, company, or community dynamics and celebrate the things shared by the group. That's what I plan to do when wishing people happy holidays and merry Christmases. My view is that the holiday season has enough room for all the holidays falling between Thanksgiving and the New Year - and each individual holiday has plenty of room to be celebrated individually by those who hold each day in a special place in their hearts.
