Word: holidaying
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...secular age, though, we needn't show obeisance to other cultures. So no mention of any days of the week, please, and all months are they that must not be named - until that lovely, unimpeachably secular holiday, Labor...
...downside to calendar correctness is that newspapers and websites won't be able to run datelines (like the one at the top of this story), at least through August. The upside: when you can't speak their names, every day's a holiday...
...That's what happened to the previous bland blandishment of "Merry Christmas." It was no more a declaration of religious belief than saying, "God bless you," when you heard a sneeze. (Remind me: is that still allowed?) Yet in the nagging belief that an invocation of the holiday might upset some people, usually referred to as "our Jewish friends," the phrase morphed into "Happy holiday" or "Happy holidays" - those days presumably being Hanukkah, Christmas and New Year's Day. Problem solved, with no offense...
...these songs? The same people responsible for most of the great pop music of the early and mid-20th century: Jews. In 1964, when Phil Spector produced a great album of seasonal tunes sung by his house performers (the Crystals, the Ronettes, etc.), he didn't call it the Holiday Album. It was A Christmas Gift for You, and it ended with Spector himself dewily intoning a Christmas wish, backed by violins sawing away at "Silent Night...
...Spector and other showbiz Jews hadn't been converted to Christianity, like Saul on the road to Tarsus. Their year-end tributes simply recognized that Christmas had already made its transition from holy day to holiday. It had become fully secularized, into a time of genial sentiment and credit-card debt - none of which had any direct connection to the birth of somebody's Savior...