Seasons Greetings!

Thursday, December 25th, 2014

Last year, around this time, friends and acquaintances offered Peter Frost all sorts of religiously neutral salutations:

Seasons Greetings! Happy Holidays! Joyeuses fêtes! Meilleurs vœux! Only two people wished me Merry Christmas.

One was Muslim, the other was Jewish.

They meant well. After all, isn’t that the culturally correct greeting? In theory, yes. In practice, most Christians feel uncomfortable affirming their identity. And this self-abnegation gets worse the closer you are to the cultural core of Anglo-America. Immigrants of Christian background enjoy being wished Merry Christmas. Black people likewise. Catholics seem to split half and half, depending on how traditional or nominal they are.

But the WASPs. Oh, the WASPs! With them, those two words are a faux pas.

[...]

What about other cultural groups? Why single out just one? But I’ve heard the answer already. WASPs and their culture dominate North America. The path to power, or simply a better life, runs through their institutions. Minorities can affirm their own identities without restricting the life choices of others, but the same does not hold true for WASPs. Their identity affects everyone and must belong to everyone.

I’m still not convinced. Yes, WASPs did create the institutions of Anglo-America, but their influence in them is now nominal at best. The U.S. Supreme Court used to be a very WASPy place. Now, there’s not a single White Protestant on it. That’s a huge underrepresentation for a group that is still close to 40% of the population. We see the same thing at the Ivy League universities, which originally trained Protestant clergy for the English colonists. Today, how many of their students have any kind of Christian European background? The proportions are estimated to be 20% at Harvard, 22% at Yale, and 15% at Columbia.

Sometimes reality is not what is commonly believed. WASPs are not at all privileged. In fact, they have been largely pushed aside in a country that was once theirs.

[...]

WASPs believe in getting ahead through rugged individualism. Most of the other groups believe in using family and ethnic connections. Guess who wins.

Comments

  1. Jewish Atheistic Guest says:

    I’m Jewish by birth, atheistic by belief, but I make it a point to say “Merry Christmas” and send Christmas cards to my Christian friends. I used to say Happy Holidays, but now that the Left has become so bossy about being non-offensive I look for ways to stick it to them. It’s just one small gesture, but at least it’s something.

  2. VA says:

    I agree with Frost about WASPs. The myth persists that WASPs are wealthy elites running things from behind the scene, despite all evidence to the contrary. Now many people who are in fact of English descend are unwilling to identify themselves as such, or if they have a scant amount of some more ‘vibrant’ ancestry they will identify as that. We are the ‘ethnicity that dare not speak its name.’ Yet few WASPs notice, or want to notice, our marginalization.

  3. Slovenian Guest says:

    Every time someone utters “happy holidays,” I reply with “happy holidays, comrade!” Because here in socialist eastern Europe, we didn’t say “merry Christmas,” either. December 25th was a normal working day, the authorities considered Christmas ideologically hostile, and Santa was replaced with Grandpa Frost, who brought gifts on New Year’s Eve. “Happy holidays” is literally cultural Marxism.

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