Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Life

‘Merry Christmas’ Does Double Duty as Innocuous Greeting and Dog-Whistle

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, tweeted its holiday well-wishes, and by “holiday well-wishes” I mean Christmastime message of exclusion. “We’re going to start saying ‘Merry Christmas again,’” the message reads, with a photo of a camouflage MAGA-hat-wearing Trumpster giving a thumbs up. This is indeed something Trump said at a recent rally in Michigan:

Watching this was, I thought, quite chilling. (Yes, we all know the refrain: Even by Trump standards.) Getting wished a Merry Christmas isn’t generally intended as a religious-minority-slighting microaggression, but is simply small talk in a majority-Christian country. You just return the greeting (or some variant of it) and move on with your day. Insistence on “Christmas,” however — that is, the politicized backlash against a War on Christmas that never was — isn’t an inadvertent insensitivity. It’s intentional, and it summons in me the twin desires to wish the recipient various happy non-Christian holidays and to say things to them that are, shall we say, more direct.

The only thing that makes me panic slightly less, oddly enough, is the context, namely Trump’s anti-PC victory tour. In an Iowa installment, the president-elect graciously reacted to being named Time magazine’s Person of the Year by whining about how it’s now “Person” as opposed to “Man of the Year.”

Why, you may ask, would I find the fact that Trump’s being casually sexist in addition to casually anti-religious-minority at his rallies these days (slightly, I mean very slightly) comforting? Because put together, they tell us that he’s still in Archie Bunker mode. This sort of anti-‘PC’ is familiar. It’s bigoted and unacceptable and all that, yes, but isn’t Phase One of a fascist project.

Please, then, let it be that. Let the regime set us back 30 years, if it must. Not 80.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy edits the Sisterhood, and can be reached at [email protected]. Her book, The Perils of “Privilege”, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in March 2017.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.