Merry CHRISTMAS!

As a public service to those who have jobs where the mention of a "Christmas" party this season is verboten, I again offer my suggestion for what to call your Call-it-anything-but-Christmas party.

Where I worked most recently, we had the YEG: Year-End Gathering. Bleh. Sometimes if the press of work pushed it into the new year, we had BYG: Beginning of the Year Gathering. Bigger bleh.

One year in response to the general derision of the official name, I came up with a non-denominational acronym that would include the spirit of the holiday without stepping on PC toes.

I pondered it one day as I walked to my distant parking space after leaving work.

I coined the name Collective Holiday Reflecting Individual Sentiments To Mark Another Season.

As an acronym, that's CHRISTMAS.

So we could have a CHRISTMAS party even if we couldn't have a Christmas party.

Nobody ever took me up on my suggestion--although I received respectful nods and grins when the full brilliance of it was absorbed.

But I continue to fling it out there every Christmas season (I think I have suggested it every year on this blog, anyway) in the hopes that someone, somewhere, will use this.

Yet my once forward-thinking suggestion may be in the rear view mirror as the word "holiday" has apparently become triggering to some.

Good Lord. It is so odd that the very secular symbols of a modern Christmas are now considered ripped from the Bible.

And don't give the anti-"Christmas" people any ideas, eh?

And rest assured, even the wish of a non-acronym Merry Christmas is not an implied forced conversion.

Feel free to wish me a Happy Festivus (or any other actual religion-based expression of good will) if that is your choice of well wishing, and I promise not to take offense, too, and instead appreciate your sentiment in your holiday season.