I was thinking about this the other day. Why does the US Gov formally recognize Christmas as a holiday, including shutting down the gov in recognition? I believe it’s the only federal holiday that honors a specific religion by giving US government employees a paid day off.
Should Christmas still be a federal holiday or should it be renamed something else?
I’ve never liked “because that’s the way we’ve always done it” as a reason to do something. But in this case I think that’s valid enough. It’s so deeply ingrained in the collective American consciousness that to do away with it would upset too many people. And everyone would end up taking it off anyway. It’s just not worth the effort to legislate it.
As tdn says, it’s such a part of American culture at this point that it’s as much a secular holiday as it is a religious one. So many people are travelling or taking time off anyway that there’s not really much reason to change it. Even as someone who doesn’t celebrate Christmas, I’ve never heard of anyone being offended by it or give an argument toward removing or renaming it, so even if it were the right thing to do, and I don’t really think it would be, there’s so few people who are pushing for it and so many people that would be opposed to it that it would end up being way more trouble than it’s worth.
Is it officially Christmas that’s a day off, or December 25?
I’m okay with Boxing Day Eve.
My school district starting giving us Rosh Hashana off at some point in the late 90s, under the unassailable logic if that more than 20% of the students were going to be staying home anyway, they might as well just shut down the school because nobody was going to be teaching anyway.
I have no problem with making that a blanket rule for government holidays. If a religious holiday is going to make you lose 20% of your workforce, might as well just make it a federal holiday.
eta: Or maybe it was Yom Kipur. I dunno, I’m not Jewish. Just insert whatever one makes the most sense there.
Who wants to work on Christmas?
How about we just call it ‘Festival of the Returning (or Unconquered) Sun’ which is what it was originally?
No?
Ok, how about Santa Claus Day?
No?
OK, what about Christmas? Is THAT OK?
You people are a hard crowd.
Is this mike on?
I absolutely think we should rename Christmas. It’s also discriminatory to have a state named after the Virgin Mary, so we’ll need to rename that to something non-religious like “Voltaireland”. And here are some other church-state issues that we need to get cracking on.
Festivus, for the rest of us.
It’s Christmas - so sayeth OPM, and in my city, the word of OPM is the Word of God. Federal Holidays
Yes, if only because I don’t need to hear more complaining about a “War on Christmas”.
Or ITR Champion could be confusing the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth, the namesake of Virginia with the Virgin Mary.
The Virgin Mary was probably named around 18 BCE. Maryland was indeed named long after that.
Yes, but presumably the name Mary existed prior to the Virgin. 
Miriam was a common name back then, as were Yeshua and Yoseph.
Maybe the very common nature of the names helped make them more acceptable to the gentile population, especially when Hellenized into the words we now use.
I think the main issue on point here (as well as with the other Church/State issues) is that there’s a venn diagram between culture and religion. A government would be absolutely stupid to ignore the prevailing culture of its constituents. The question that arises is that how much of this overlap needs to be ignored? I think it’s silly to say that 100% of the culture that touches religion should be ignored*, but at the same time you have to draw a line to keep religious freedom intact.
I think Christmas in particular has been sufficiently secularized that we can say it’s in the “okay” group. I mean, most atheists I know at least tokenly celebrate Christmas, hell I know American Jews that participate in the Christmas season.
Hurm. It’s my understanding that it’s no coincidence that a colony founded as a haven for Catholics was named Maryland and that the claim that it was named for Henrietta Maria was a polite fiction. But I can’t find anything about it poking through Google and I don’t have the gumption to wade through my library for it.
As for the OP, I think Christmas is pretty secularized.
If people really want to keep Christmas, then we can define it as the state commemoration of George Washington crossing the Delaware River and defeated the Hessians.