Mr. Magazine

New Statesman magazine bills itself “Britain’s award-winning current affairs weekly,” and keeping with current affairs this week’s issue celebrates Christmas and the New Year in a very special way. The magazine offers “100 pages of the finest writing…” inside this end-of-the-year issue. Included in the issue is more than one defense of the use of the terms Merry Christmas and Happy Christmas rather than the so-called politically correct Happy Holidays. What caught my attention was the essay by Richard Dawkins, the Oxford University professor and self professed atheist and author of The God Delusion book. He writes,

“For better or worse, ours is historically a Christian culture, and children who grow up ignorant of biblical literature are diminished, unable to take literary allusions, actually impoverished. I am no lover of Christianity, and I loathe the annual orgy of waste and reckless reciprocal spending, but I must say I’d rather wish you ‘Happy Christmas’ than ‘Happy Holiday Season.”

New Statesman magazine is filled with Christmas essays, fiction, quizzes and awards. Very well done and best usage of the word Christmas that I have seen in a long long time…

And for those of us who celebrate the birth of Jesus, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.