Uncommon Commentary #34: We Demand "Inclusivity," but Not Inclusivity of Everyone

Now that Thanksgiving has ended, we've arrived at a time which for some decades now has tended to mark the secular onset of Christmas season. (We Christians know better; what actually comes up next is Advent season, and what secular culture used to call simply "Christmas" is merely the first of the 12 Days of Christmas.) In recent years, though, as you've surely noticed, retailers seem to have done things differently; not only are they beginning the season earlier—I recall some commercials featuring Santa Claus that aired even before Halloween, for crying out loud—but also, a growing number of them, perhaps now the majority, are dropping the name "Christmas" and replacing it with "Holiday," as if it were the only holiday on the calendar. Could that be any more imbecilic?
What makes it especially so is that Christmas has no true major holidays with which to compete during its time of the year. Chanukah (which is not a holiday anyway, but lasts for nine days) was a minor festival until well into the Twentieth Century--indeed, some rabbis thought that it ought not to be celebrated at all, because of what they saw as its nationalist rather than universal character--when, in response to Jewish children's envy of the presents received by their gentile brethren, it was magnified into what we know now. In contrast, "Kwanzaa" isn't even an historic feast, but was simply dreamt up in the 1960's by a Black Nationalist, who (perhaps misinterpreting the lyrics of White Christmas) thought that there ought to be an alternative to what he perceived as a holiday only for persons of European descent. Late December's only other observance in an extant religious tradition is that of the winter solstice; the heathens who celebrate that one can, and deserve to, be ignored.
Anyway, although Hinduism, Islam, &c., are last-minute entrants into the USA's "diversity" derby, Judaism and atheism have long existed alongside Christianity in this country; yet there's no indication that Jews or even the nullifidians, until very recently, found it offensive to call Christmas by its name. (Indeed, I doubt that the majority of at least the former find it so now; I'd be interested in seeing the results of a poll on the subject.)
Pagans often try to counter by arguing that the Christians have usurped their traditions. It's true that the Christmas tree, for instance, is largely a borrowing from the forms of worship in pre-Christian Germany, but trees have importance in Christian symbolism, and tree-decorations such as gold angels and the surmounting star obviously owe nothing to the older religion; at any rate, the tree has come to be associated with Christmas rather than with neo-paganism or Buddhism or whatever, and so to rename it a "holiday tree" is disingenuous as well as paranoid and stupid.
Why, then, have retailers censored Christmas? I don't believe that most of them hate Christianity. (Nor, however, do I believe that they're trying to be "inclusive." How can you be "inclusive" by excluding the majority, namely, the three-fourths of the people of this land who identify themselves as Christians?) Rather I believe that they are pusillanimously seeking to avoid lawsuits and boycotts, and that because of a lack of religious fervor on the part of most ostensible Christians, they think that they can afford to antagonize believers for the sake of appeasing the fringe who deem it "offensive," "unconstitutional," &c., to do anything that acknowledges, however obliquely, the fact that the USA has a nominal Christian majority.
In conclusion, I should add that there's already a designation for Christmas that ought to satisfy everyone: "Xmas." The "X" stands for Christ, but it can also symbolize the unknown (as in "x-ray") or the forbidden (as in "x-rated"); both these alternate significations seem ironically appropriate for use by the Grinches and Scrooges of our time, who have both lost the meaning of the holiday and enjoined everyone else from finding it. It also seems noteworthy that the Third Reich replaced Christmas with the above-mentioned pagan celebration of the winter solstice; the noteworthiness lies in the fact that even the National Socialists ("Nazis") were honest enough to abolish Christmas, rather than just bastardize it into a generic, commercialized, secular "Holiday."