First of all, take whatever seasons greetings you would like from the list above, and ignore the others.<\/p>\n
And now onto the ranting.<\/p>\n
Reading some US-based Atheist blogs, it appears that our friends on the other side of the pond can sometimes get a little wound up about what seasons greetings they receive. To the extent that a woman has been punched<\/a> for saying “Happy Holidays” – hopefully the assailant will get prosecuted for ‘aggravated assault’ or something equivalent. After all getting physical with someone who has\u00a0deliberately\u00a0<\/em>insulted you is wrong; getting physical with someone who has just wished you well is downright evil.<\/p>\n Except for occasional outbreaks of gross stupidity such as Birmingham’s winterval controversy<\/a>, people in the UK are just a little bit more sensible about the whole situation. In particular christmas is\u00a0not<\/em> seen as an exclusively christian event – to the extent that I’m seen as a little weird when I wish people “Happy Winter Solstice” (and I’m happy to be thought of as weird!) even though people know I’m not a christian.<\/p>\n Christmas isn’t a christian event? Of course not. Even christians don’t do the religious thing over the\u00a0whole<\/em> period; for most there is just a short christmas midnight mass and then it is back to eating and drinking too much in the company of family. If I were the christian god, I’d be shouting “Get on your knees you miserable sinners” the whole period.<\/p>\n And bear in mind that some of us get confused as well: I recently wished someone a “Happy Winchester” as a seasons greeting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" First of all, take whatever seasons greetings you would like from the list above, and ignore the others. And now onto the ranting. Reading some US-based Atheist blogs, it appears that our friends on the other side of the pond can sometimes get a little wound up about what seasons greetings they receive. To the […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[7,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-religion","category-7-id","category-10-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1f2KI-Pd","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3175"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3175\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3176,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3175\/revisions\/3176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}