Happy Holidays, such as they are.

I don’t write incendiary posts. I find it exhausting and presumptuous to rant about a debate without giving the opposition an opportunity for rebuttal. I have opinions, but I don’t like to force them on others, unprovoked.

Plus, it’s way easier to just complain about my car.

Still, I’m going to break my soapbox out of storage for a moment, because this is on my mind, and Maya Angelou made me cry this morning.

The secularization of Christmas has been a Big Issue for a while now, and I’m a little baffled by the suddenly volatile debate about whether corporations and retailers should be saying “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Holidays.”

I am not religious. That is to say, I was not raised to follow a particular religious doctrine. My mother, who abandoned organized religion after years of being a Sunday School teacher, thinks this may have been a mistake. Even while she shies from the church and encourages me to make up my own mind about faith, she laments that I will never understand the power of religious belief or the sense of community it can offer, because I was never immersed in it. I see her point, but I honestly think that my upbringing provides me an objectivity with which to view various religions of the world, without being biased by years of preaching, for better or for worse. World religions fascinate me—all of them—and my analytical mind benefits from distance. I’m lucky not to have adopted that ugly characteristic that I unfortunately see in so many practitioners (and their opposition): contempt. It prevents me from grouping all members of a given religion into a lump stereotype.

I don’t know whether to be amused or aghast at the hostility toward the phrase, “Happy Holidays.” Bill O’Reilly has told us that when we wish someone “Happy Holidays,” we are buying a peak-rate train ticket to Hell.

Are Christian conservatives really so presumptuous as to assume that Christmas is the only winter holiday worth well wishes? (But there I go already with the grouping and the lumping, so let me amend that statement to apply only to those particular Christian conservatives that appear so affronted by the evil of that alliterate phrase.) Set aside for a moment the notion that other holidays like Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and New Year’s seem to be belittled and sent from the room like a bratty younger brother, or Canada. I’m not convinced that Christmas is only about the birth of Jesus. We all know the man wasn’t even born on that day, and that, historically, the holiday was contrived by Constantine to eclipse the Pagan festivities that threatened his new Christianity, and which were the original celebration of the season. But even if you do view Christmas solely as a “Happy Birthday, Jesus” moment, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to accept that some people prefer to concentrate on the more abstract ideals of the season, like peace on Earth and good will toward men. To denounce those celebrators is to denounce the ideals of the faith you are trying to promote, and is paradoxically errant. Saying “Merry Christmas” wishes happiness to Christians. Saying “Happy Holidays” wishes happiness to all, including Christians. Why is this a bad thing?

The way to spread peace through Jesus is not to push away those people who try to celebrate the season with you.

Maya Angelou was on the Today Show this morning.

Growing up, I was a smart kid. But I was more concerned with having a quick wit than an encyclopedic knowledge of What Came Before, and I had more than a little aversion to authority. So when my public school told me we all had to read Maya Angelou because it was Important and Significant, and would make us all better people, I bought the Cliff’s Notes and went off to try and make Level 17 at Tetris.

If you had asked me at twelve about Maya Angelou’s place in the history of Great Writers, I would have told you she was probably in a pub somewhere with Chaucer, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and JD Salinger, all of them discussing the great Character Arc and the Metaphor and the Social Commentary. If you had told me that one day I would see Maya Angelou chatting up Katie Couric on the Today Show thirteen years later, I probably would have laughed at you while surreptitiously checking your medications, because surely Maya Angelou has been dead for a hundred years. I obviously know better by now, but she will always be one of those people I am surprised to see holding a cell phone or programming her TiVo.

Anyway, Ms. Angelou was on the Today Show, where she read an excerpt from her newest work, Amazing Peace: A Christmas Poem. I was flitting about the apartment, preparing to leave for work, but when Maya started to read her poem, I felt I should sit down and give it my full attention, because it might be Important or Significant. Also, her wise old voice was soothing, and made me want to be still.

Her words were clear and beautiful, and rang true. Her voice was somehow raspy and velvety at the same time, and she spoke with such…earnest kindness. She had longing and hope, reassurance and faith. Listening to Maya Angelou read her own words of peace was like being both calmed and stirred. By the time she finished, I realized I had tears on my face. If you know me, you know this is not normal, because I cry about as often as I clean my bathroom floor—which has geological layers of hairspray and dirt that can trace the passage of time—and I’m not really one for poetry.

But there I was, and there she was, and there we were together, both wishing for the peace on Earth I had never admitted I truly longed for. So anyway, Happy Holidays everybody, and Bill O’Reilly can kiss my alliteration.

Amazing Peace: A Christmas Poem
By Dr. Maya Angelou

Thunder rumbles in the mountain passes
And lightning rattles the eaves of our houses.
Flood waters await us in our avenues.

Snow falls upon snow, falls upon snow to avalanche
Over unprotected villages.
The sky slips low and grey and threatening.

We question ourselves.
What have we done to so affront nature?
We worry God.
Are you there? Are you there really?
Does the covenant you made with us still hold?

Into this climate of fear and apprehension, Christmas enters,
Streaming lights of joy, ringing bells of hope
And singing carols of forgiveness high up in the bright air.
The world is encouraged to come away from rancor,
Come the way of friendship.

It is the Glad Season.
Thunder ebbs to silence and lightning sleeps quietly in the corner.
Flood waters recede into memory.
Snow becomes a yielding cushion to aid us
As we make our way to higher ground.

Hope is born again in the faces of children
It rides on the shoulders of our aged as they walk into their sunsets.
Hope spreads around the earth. Brightening all things,
Even hate which crouches breeding in dark corridors.

In our joy, we think we hear a whisper.
At first it is too soft. Then only half heard.
We listen carefully as it gathers strength.
We hear a sweetness.
The word is Peace.
It is loud now. It is louder.
Louder than the explosion of bombs.

We tremble at the sound.
We are thrilled by its presence.
It is what we have hungered for.
Not just the absence of war. But, true Peace.
A harmony of spirit, a comfort of courtesies.
Security for our beloveds and their beloveds.

We clap hands and welcome the Peace of Christmas.
We beckon this good season to wait a while with us.
We, Baptist and Buddhist, Methodist and Muslim, say come.
Peace.
Come and fill us and our world with your majesty.
We, the Jew and the Jainist, the Catholic and the Confucian,
Implore you, to stay a while with us.
So we may learn by your shimmering light
How to look beyond complexion and see community.

It is Christmas time, a halting of hate time.

On this platform of peace, we can create a language
To translate ourselves to ourselves and to each other.

At this Holy Instant, we celebrate the Birth of Jesus Christ
Into the great religions of the world.
We jubilate the precious advent of trust.
We shout with glorious tongues at the coming of hope.
All the earth's tribes loosen their voices
To celebrate the promise of Peace.

We, Angels and Mortal's, Believers and Non-Believers,
Look heavenward and speak the word aloud.
Peace. We look at our world and speak the word aloud.
Peace. We look at each other, then into ourselves
And we say without shyness or apology or hesitation.

Peace, My Brother.
Peace, My Sister.
Peace, My Soul.