Happy Holidays!

“Christmas has turned into an orgiastic festival of consumption, desire and mockery…. It’s just an ornament in the great orgy of the shopping rush,” write Jarosław Makowski and Kazimierz Bem in “Gazeta Świąteczna” (a holiday edition of “Gazeta Wyborcza”); this remark, though not very revealing, definitely appeals to me, as formally it’s orgiastic.

Personally, I don’t believe that such an elaborate, baroque phrase can be used entirely seriously. That’s why I suppose that what we have here is a perverse and ambiguous text that would be understood literally by morally mighty readers and which cynics would take as a self-ironic satire, a play with conventions. Still, both the former and the latter would take pleasure in reading it. And for the publicists, who were able to reach such diametrically different environments: Chapeau bas!

When it comes to America, about which we generally write in this column, it is on a different, further level of Christmas reflection. The orgiastic consumption festival has been accepted here for a long time; America believes that without it the middle class — shopkeepers and small entrepreneurs — would be doomed. Now Americans differ only as far as their rituals are concerned. They can’t agree on how the shamans performing the great orgy of the shopping rush, or — translating from Makowski’s and Bem’s rich language into normal speech — the shopkeepers, should say goodbye to their Christmas shopping-dazed customers.

There are practically two possibilities: “Merry Christmas” and “Happy Holidays.” The first one is Christian and traditional, the second one modern, coming from the political correctness policy and the eagerness not to offend the shopping Muslims, Jews or atheists.

In the shops in Washington one can hear almost solely “Happy Holidays.” But in Dallas, for instance, a church made a web page of disgrace on which Internet users put the names of shops that are ashamed of saying “Merry Christmas.” According to the PRRI/RNS Religion News opinion poll, 49 percent of Americans from the whole country opt for “Merry Christmas” and 44 percent for “Happy Holidays.”

“Happy Holidays” is still slightly losing but it’s on the offensive, not only in America, but also worldwide. Thousands of Christmas trees are decorating shopping centers in the Middle East; Arabian shopkeepers shamelessly try to join the festival of orgiastic consumption. Only this year, a hotel in Abu Dhabi spent $11 million for a tree covered in golden balls, diamonds and sapphires.

One would think it only obvious that if non-Christians want to celebrate Christmas, at least in a mutilated form, they should also accept its name. It’s Christians that could get offended at the phrase “Merry Christmas,” as their holiday is turning into another Valentine’s Day, only more super-duper in form — a global, universal day of human kindness which we express by leaving gifts under the Christmas tree. In the face of such a downfall, “Merry Christmas,” said by all the shopkeepers of the world — the murderers of Christmas tradition — sounds like a sneer, almost like a hangman wishing health to a convict.