'Twas the Season

I make my living from a small professional private practice. I started it up last year, and a big part of my marketing efforts were directed at making nice with others in my community who were in a position to send me referral business. When I do get a new client this way, I send a thank-you to the person who made the referral.

So it was Christmas time and I sent one of these thank-you notes to a colleague who’s kind of a bigshot here in town. I usually type these things out on my computer, put ‘em on letterhead, and send ‘em out. But I like to write a little note by hand at the bottom to personalize the letter a bit. I made the mistake of writing “Merry Christmas,” on the bottom of this particular note.

A few days later I got a flame voice mail from the bigshot, informing me patronizingly that she was “deeply offended” that I had wished her Merry Christmas, that “not everyone celebrates Christmas,” and finally that she “hopes I’ll be more sensitive to others in the future.”

Hmm. At first I was embarrassed. Then pissed. Then I got into a really interesting discussion with my wife (who’s a law student and likes to think about these kinds of things) about the conflicting interests of freedom of expression versus freedom from expression in a democratic society. In the end, I was glad that the self-righteous bigshot had called me out on the carpet, because it led to my thinking hard about an interesting ethical issue that I’d never bothered to really form a reasoned position on until now.

So what did I finally decide? I decided that there’s nothing inherently offensive or discriminatory in an expression of goodwill, from within one’s own particular idiom (be it atheistic, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or whatever), and that to opt for a culturally-generic phrase (like “Happy Holidays”) out of a fear of giving offense is a de facto denial of the diversity that the politically-correct crowd claims to defend.

Of course, I’ve been wrong before…