Keep the Christmas spirit alive in the new year
Resolve to treat others with civility and courtesy, Naomi Lakritz says.
Well, another Christmas has survived the Christmas season. And once again, the usual complaints about Season’s Greetings and Happy Holidays, versus Merry Christmas, surfaced.
They were accompanied by the standard argument that the former two greetings are intended to kowtow to minorities (none of whom have actually insisted on being kowtowed to) or to placate left-leaning liberals (who invented the myth that “Merry Christmas” offends minorities).
Why are people so convinced that a couple of innocuous greetings are the harbingers of the death, or at least the diminution, of Christmas? It hurts no one when a store clerk wishes a customer Happy Holidays. The real diminishment of Christmas comes when a customer viciously assails a clerk with racist epithets, as happened this month in a Calgary supermarket.
What prompted this ugly attack? The cashier, who from all accounts is little more than a teenager, accidentally scanned one of the customer’s items twice and then called for a manager to help him cancel one of the charges.
“Before the manager even got there, (the customer) began with just immediate racial attacks on the cashier,” Steven Lemmon, another customer who filmed the whole thing, told CBC.
“When the manager got there, it didn’t stop. He continued the racial attack on the cashier. He threatened to rip his chain off and jam it down his throat. He called him out to the parking lot. This is a kid.”
The man also turned his wrath on another customer who tried to intervene to calm the man down, shoving the customer. Judging by the ugly words that were used, it would be fairly safe to assume that the individual who tried to restore some peace is also a member of a minority.
The police have now laid charges against the man, including uttering threats, creating a disturbance and assault. All well and good. The law should definitely hold this man to account for his terrible behaviour.
But in the bigger picture, it’s this sort of incident that more than anything else destroys the ideal of Christmas in our supposedly civilized democracy. The Christmas spirit of peace on Earth, good will toward others apparently can’t even make it through December.
An atheist meme posted on Facebook — a picture of the Earth with the caption “Axial tilt is the reason for the season” — hurts nobody. It’s even rather amusing. Incivility, however, irreparably frays the threads that tie our urban community of Calgary together every day.
Now that Christmas is over and the misguided complaints over Happy Holidays have ceased making for Unhappy Holidays, people have moved on to thinking about the new year. And apart from marvelling at how quickly 2017 passed by, the usual silliness about new year’s resolutions abounds — going to the gym, losing weight, yadda yadda yadda.
The gym, the weight loss and all the rest will be abandoned by February. (Just ask the owners of those gyms who are racking up all the memberships now).
There is really only one resolution anybody needs to make, and it is much easier to keep than the one about running on the treadmill three times a week.
That resolution is to treat others with civility and courtesy as we go about our daily lives throughout the year. Your grocery item accidentally got scanned twice? This type of petty annoyance is bound to happen. Ask the clerk courteously to fix it, thank him when he does and then move on.
The real threat to Christmas lies in not keeping the Christmas spirit alive all the rest of the time, thereby turning that spirit into a hypocrisy and a farce 365 days a year.
Peace on Earth may be a bit much to ask, but good will toward others is not. You just need to be civil. It’s so easy to do. And it doesn’t require a membership in anything except the human race.