Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Back to Opinion

‘Happy Holidays,’ You Liberal So-and-So!

With Thanksgiving now over, it’s time for the annual battle over the “war on Christmas.” This year, it is playing out on Republican T-shirts.

The National Republican Congressional Committee is offering its supporters a holiday red T-shirt, fit just for the season.

On the front a sneering punch line reads: “’Happy Holidays’ is what liberals say.” On the back: “Merry Christmas”

That was enough to reignite the war.

The “Happy Holiday” greeting has been widely used in recent years as a way to include non-Christians in the holiday spirit. It has become the standard for presidential greetings (at times alongside the traditional “merry Christmas”) and is spread over storefronts and Hallmark cards.

Some on the right have taken issue with the receding of “Merry Christmas” from the public square. Rush Limbaugh, among others, blames liberal political correctness for driving out the explicit Christmas greeting. Former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin devoted her recent book to “protecting the heart of Christmas” from those who wish to replace it with a religiously neutral blessing.

For American Jews, “Happy holidays,” marked a welcome adjustment in the season’s greeting vocabulary and therefore Jewish lawmakers were among the first to take on the NRCC T-shirt.

“Blast! And here I was going to get my husband one of these @NRCC shirts for Chanukah,” Tweeted Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Florida Democrat who chairs the Democratic National Committee.

The shirts, however, are no longer available on the NRCC website, Buzzfeed reported.

Was it because of the offense Jews and liberals have taken?

Not at all. They were simply sold out, a NRCC spokesperson said.

Instead, The Hill reports, the group is now offering a shirt that says: “I’m not afraid to say ‘Merry Christmas.’” It is selling for $39.99.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.