In Europe, the word holiday
can refer to what in America is called a vacation, which of course can occur
whether or not the vacation falls on a national holiday. Regarding the latter,
the official designation of a holiday by a government renders the holiday valid
anywhere in the country’s territory. This does not mean that very resident or
even citizen is duty-bound to pay any attention to a given national holiday, but
deciding not to celebrating a holiday does not thereby mean that it is not
legitimate and thus valid. Deliberately acting out from the instinctual
urge of passive aggression by refusing even to say the name of a national
holiday in public discourse, as if a personal decision not to celebrate a
national holiday eviscerates it on the national calendar can be viewed as a
case of hyperextended projection from a personal dislike to the personal desire
to cancel the national holiday, as if a personal dislike could nullify a
national law or proclamation. Behind the passive aggression is none other than
selfishness, which implies loving oneself over loving God. Theological (rather
than psychological) self-love renders the world as a projection of the self, including
its narrowly circumscribed (to private benefits only) interests. Hence, the
unrestrained ego leaps from its own dislike to being entitled to unilaterally,
as a private actor, nullify an officially designated national holiday as null
and void. I contend that Nietzsche’s philosophy can shed some light on this
modern phenomenon concerning Christmas, an official U.S. holiday. Kindness as actually
passive aggression is tailor-made for Nietzsche’s eviscerating scalpel, which
he wielded to expose the power-aggrandizement being exercised under the disguise
of the moral injunction of Thou Shalt Not!
Nietzsche, late nineteenth-century
European philosopher, theorized that the weak seek to beguile the strong by pressuring
the latter to be ashamed of being strong, which includes being self-confident
rather than resentful. Whereas the strong designate the weak merely as bad, the
weak, who resort even to cruelty as a desperate means of feeling the pleasure
of power, the weak label the strong as evil. The asymmetry here leaps off the
page! Such seething loathing of the strong is itself an indication of the
deplorable weak constitution of the weak, especially those who are too weak to
master their intractable urge to dominate. The strong are strong enough to
master their most intractable instinctual urge, so any resentment toward the
herd animals is mastered such that they are merely bad, rather than evil. With
such internal mastery, the strong can bathe in their self-confidence, out of
which generosity naturally flows. Even in regarding the resentful weak as
merely bad rather than as evil, the strong can be viewed as being generous, for
the attitude of the weak toward the strong is indeed sordid and even toxic. Therefore,
Nietzsche suggests that the strong maintain a pathos of distance, which can be interpreted
both as social distance and emotional distance, from the ill herd lest the
strong too become sick. The shift to “happy holiday” instead of “Merry
Christmas” had by 2024 become so ubiquitous in public without any official mandate
that a herd mentality can be inferred.
It is not enough for the resentful
weak to refuse to celebrate a national holiday, such as Christmas or even Thanksgiving
(who doesn’t like food?); the weak who seek to dominate the strong, in spite of
the obvious point of being weaker both in terms of external and inner power,
actively attempt to beguile the strong into being ashamed even for saying the
word Christmas in public! The American retail sector has been acting as an
enabler for the weak by tacitly refusing to recognize Christmas even though stores
are almost all closed on Christmas Day. The retail executives and middle managers
who espouse passive-aggression by directing employees not to say, “Merry
Christmas” even on the day before Christmas; instead, customers buying Christmas
presents are accosted with the inherently passive aggressive, “Enjoy your
holiday” as a looping recording blasted out throughout the store, “This
holiday, . . .” A national holiday is by definition not your holiday, as
the holiday is officially recognized within the territory of the nation.
As if turning on a dime, every year on December 26th, public discourse suddenly reverts back to being able to say the name of the next holiday, New Year’s Day, without any hint of the previous month of “Happy Holiday” and “Enjoy your holiday.” Making this switch it itself a passive aggressive slap on Santa’s rosy cheeks. As an experiment one year, I turned to “Enjoy your holiday” after Christmas whenever a stranger (including retail employees!) said, “Happy New Year.” More than once, the other person was offended. Imagine if I were to say, “Enjoy your holiday,” to a Black American on Martin Luther King Day in January. Naturally, the person would take offense, as the explicit implication would be that the holiday is only valid for Black people even though it is a national holiday. Were I to apply the phrase to July 4th, which is Independence Day in the U.S., I would be implying that I am against that nation. Were I to say, “Enjoy your holiday” on Thanksgiving and even go so far in passive aggression to insist that the holiday be called a day of mourning (even though the holiday is based on a peaceful feast in 1620 attended both by American Indians and European settlers in Massachusetts), my resentment would (or should) be quite evident to other people. Were I to inform people in public places, including stores, not only that they cannot say Thanksgiving, but also that they must refer to the holiday as the Day of Mourning, the hearers could legitimately call me out for not only stubbornly refusing to admit that Thanksgiving is a national holiday, but also imposing my own ideology as if everyone else must speak in line with it. One year at a “Holiday Party” at my alma mater, Yale, an employee replied to me, “We can’t say that,” after I had quietly observed that it was really a Christmas party. We can’t? Was a law passed in Connecticut prohibiting people from using the words, “Christmas Party” even at a private university? It is precisely the default of can’t as if its pronouncement were a jurisprudential fact of reason that I wish to expose and eviscerate as not only sordid, but enabling too.
There is a qualitative difference between personal and public holidays. To unilaterally, whether as an individual of a member of a group, implicitly castigate people even for saying the name of a public holiday as if it were a personal holiday, whether of an individual (e.g., a birthday) or a group (e.g., the Solstices, Easter, St. Patrick’s Day, Hanukkah, Devali, and Quanza) is to conflate two different categories. In fact, a third category exists: holidays that are not official national holidays and yet are not limited to a group and thus are de facto (rather than de jure) public in nature (e.g., Halloween and Valentine’s Day, and perhaps St. Patrick’s Day, as drinking green beer is hardly limited to Americans under 40 of Irish ancestry). Were there no difference between private and national (and even de facto public) holidays, then governments would hardly go to the trouble of proclaiming national holidays, which of course are explicitly valid officially valid throughout a country. I turn now to some implications.
Firstly, that everyone does not celebrate a national (or de facto public) holiday does not nullify that holiday. In fact, it is ridiculous for a person to claim that because one does not like or do anything on a given national holiday, it is therefore not really even a legal holiday.
Secondly, that a number of private, group-only holidays occur in the
same month as a national (and even a public) holiday does not mean that people
should not refer in public to the national holiday by name. In the U.S., there
is only one national (and public) holiday in the month of December; Americans
don’t say “happy holidays” leading up to Halloween even though Veterans Day is
not far behind in November.
Thirdly, the fact that a group
relishes a certain national (or otherwise public) holiday does not render that
holiday only private, and thus devoid of any broader meaning or
significance. If the group is religious in nature, this does not necessarily
mean that the public holiday is religious. For other religious groups to stubbornly
suppose so in utter resentment and jealousy ignores the separation of “church
and state” in the U.S. Constitution, which bars Congress from establishing a
religion and thus proclaiming a religious interpretation or origin of a public
holiday. A secular holiday can be proclaimed as such and thus clear the
bar of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution even if a religious group celebrates
the holiday in a non-secular way and even if the holiday itself had a distinctly
religious origin. Halloween, for example, which admittedly is not a U.S. national
holiday but it generally observed nonetheless (rather than being a group holiday)
had by the twenty-first century become almost completely secular in America
even though it is on the eve of All Saints Day in Christianity. The latter does
not negate or nullify the secular holiday of Halloween; children need not
accept the Nicene Creed in order to put on costumes and go trick-or-treating
for candy. As for Christmas, the distinctly Christian feast of it is not
theologically significant as neither the Incarnation or the Resurrection are
celebrated on December 25th, for the Incarnation is celebrated on March 25th—nine
months before December 25th, and the Resurrection is celebrated on
Easter in March or April. It is a blunder, therefore, to assume not only
that there is no secular holiday (e.g., gift-giving, Santa, and even Frosty the
Snowman), but also that that even the religious holiday marks anything distinctly
theological (qua supernatural)! Jealousy and resentment can indeed be blinding,
or at the very least have a distorting effect on a person’s emotions, cognitions
and perception.
For an advocate of a group-limited private holiday not only to refuse to admit that a public holiday is such a holiday, but also to insist that other people cannot acknowledge and even say the name of such a holiday in public simply goes too far. Resentful selfishness that resorts to passive aggression is indeed evil, for to insist that other people abide by a social reality that is a projection of the selfish self denies that none of us are deities. That is, self-love over love directed to God is the root sin behind the over-reach here. To counter such evil, I recommend that people in the U.S. say “Happy Holiday” and “Enjoy your holiday” for every holiday except Christmas, even to retail clerks. Even though most people might be confused, others—the more insightful—will get the passive-aggressive message that it is unfair to single out a certain national holiday as non grata and even as forbidden in public discourse. The main point is of course that passive aggression should be rendered transparent so that its beguiling and hateful spite can be weakened, as befitting the weak who tacitly, yet intentionally nonetheless, weaponize the phenomenon of holidays.
That the American retail sector enables this weaponization renders companies as de facto accomplices, and thus hardly as neutral parties. To the extent that American culture reflects the retail culture, including its nomenclature and mannerisms, the responsibility of business not to perpetuate and enforce a specific passive-aggressive ideology whose source is exogenous to business is all the greater. By interiorizing such an ideology, a store (i.e., its employees, including store managers) becomes passive aggressive and thus deserves push-back from resentful customers. The irony is that the store managers and even their executives at company headquarters intend precisely to avoid offending customers. Including the name of all national holidays, rather than substituting this holiday or happy holidays for one such holiday both in the stores and in advertisements, is a legitimate and fair alternative marketing (retail) strategy. That some customers might be offended just by the name of a specific public holiday is no reason for the dog to be led by its tail. Being led by oversensitive ideologically-driven customers is not socially responsible, as it is not fair to all of the strong, self-confident customers who are willing to generously spend in the midst of celebrating a national holiday. For a national, public holiday is a statement that a certain holiday is legitimate and thus valid in a country, even though not every resident necessarily does anything to mark the holiday and some residents, even citizens, may be personally opposed. To be sure, the latter have a protected political right to oppose something based on an ideology, but they do not have the authority to impose that ideology to limit the free speech of other people, not to mention to unilaterally cancel a national holiday. Such a holiday is valid whether its opponents like it or not, and the latter do not have the right to cancel the free-speech of other people who wish to specify even just the specific name of such a holiday. Arrogance looking down on the rest of us from the stilts of false-entitlement is indeed unbecoming of anyone.
