Not if imposes on the non-Christian minority. But if the majority of non-Christians also want to make the birth of the Christian God into a Federal holiday, I don’t see why they shouldn’t. When you have to convince people who are happy with the way things are that they are really being oppressed . . . well, I won’t say you’ve already lost the argument; feminism did just that, after all, and thank goodness. But seriously, if you can’t convince Der Trihs that this is a problem, you’re not starting off very well!
Let’s not take this too far. The “clear language of the constitution” doesn’t lead us to a conclusion that Christmas being a federal holiday = “establishment of religion”. The Lemon test, if you ask me, says that we now interpret it that way, but the Lemon test stretches the “clear language of the constitution” beyond what many people would consider appropriate.
Just because some holidays are good for the economy doesn’t mean all them are. President’s day and Martin Luther King Day don’t generate any significant economic activity and they are probably an economic liability overall. Christmas is ideally situated to be an economic driver because it is placed on the calendar at a spot where nothing of significance would be going on otherwise. It also ideal from the perspective of businesses because it gives us the week from Christmas to New Year’s Day to finish the year-end reporting and and finalize the financials. You would need that even if neither of those holidays existed.
From an economic perspective, the holidays are not laid out that well in general. Christmas is just about perfect in that regard but you don’t get another economically stimulating holiday again until Valentine’s Day and that is still fairly minor. The next significant one is Easter or Mother’s Day and still not in the same league with Christmas by an order of magnitude. Economically speaking, it would be best to invent a couple of other holidays where gift giving or large parties are expected and place them in March and August. That isn’t as dumb as it sounds. All American holidays were essentially invented in their current form in the last 150 years and some much much newer than that.
No, the primary effect is to give everyone a day off to do whatever they want. There is nothing in the statute that suggests, much less requires, that people use the day off to celebrate a religious holiday. In fact, only a minority of Christians participate in any sort of worship service. A few years ago, it was a minor news story that many large evangelical churches were canceling services on Christmas because not enough members were showing up to make them worthwhile. (If that’s not evidence that it’s a predominantly secular holiday, I don’t know what is. It’s certainly not the case that traditional Christian celebration of the day involves eschewing organized services to spend time with family, which is why that made the news.) But even if the majority did choose to celebrate with a religious observance, that wouldn’t be an effect of the law, much less the primary effect.
Your anecdotes are interesting and your fact is wrong. Here is some actual actual data.
Of the people who celebrate Christmas (which is almost everyone) 82% say their celebration is least somewhat religious. And 62% of all Americans attend some religious service. The fact that they also participate in secular activities is irrelevant. As I said above, all our religious holidays have secular elements to them. And “spending time with family” is what we do on any holiday. People would do that if every single holiday were tied to the Christian calendar of holidays, but that wouldn’t be an argument to support our holidays being primarily secular.
You really need to look up the definition of the word “primary.” If you were anywhere close to accurate, it would be a minor problem, at most, with changing Christmas’s name to “Do What You Like Day.”
I’d imagine that roughly similar numbers say that their celebration of Thanksgiving is “somewhat religious.” Plenty of people pray before eating, but that doesn’t mean that lunch breaks are primarily religious. The fact that evangelical Christians were skipping the traditionally Christian celebration of the birth of Christ is what I consider evidence for the secularization of Christmas, not that they spend time with their families.
In any event, the fact that the majority of people spend at least part of their day being “somewhat religious” is not evidence that giving people the day off has the primary effect of promoting religious practice. People can celebrate religious holidays without taking the day off (like they do for Ash Wednesday or Good Friday, which is far more important religiously than Christmas). So the effect of the law is to give people the day off, not to cause them to do something religious.
If the majority of Christians spent the entire day in religious services, such that they would be unable to do so if they had to work, then you could argue that a primary effect of the law was to allow them to engage in religious practice. But that’s not the case, and I don’t think the Lemon test is meant to prohibit something that only incidentally promotes religion. In fact, it is specifically designed to allow such things, provided there is a secular purpose as well.
What I’m proposing doesn’t prevent a single Christian from praying all day long and flaggellating himself with thorns while doing so. It simply takes away the religious designation of the day and that’s exactly what the Christians find so objectionable: changing the name of the holiday and shifting it to another day in late December offends them, and on purely religious grounds.
Scheduling. If everyone is going to have a celebration that involves the family all getting together, having a feast and ritually exchanging gifts, they aren’t likely to want to split it into two days according to their respective religious beliefs. In your plan, how would you get people to go along with it instead of exchanging gifts on Christmas like always and just kicking back and watching TV on the new day off?
I’m substituting a secular holiday for a non-secular holiday. They can exchange all the gifts they want to, on any day of the year they like. You know that someone just made up “December 25th is Jesus’s birthday” right? And you know that the First Amendment prohibits any state endorsement of a particular religion’s beliefs, right? Doesn’t seem much to sacrifice to me, especially since complying with the Constitution at its clearest seems pretty virtuous in itself as an outcome.
I already said that December 25th was just made and has real economic benefits. How do you respond to those facts and how would you replace them? I want more, not fewer holidays in the U.S. especially Halloween (it is widely celebrated but not an official holiday) and I am dead serious about that. How do respond to that?
I prefer actual, not imagined, data. 
Who cares whether it’s becoming more or less secular? It’s Christmas. It’s a religious holiday. It originated as one, and it remains one. The primary purpose of having a federal holiday on Christmas Day is because it’s Christmas Day, a religious holiday.
It’s just a matter of degree. Let’s say that, tomorrow, the federal government declared that our new federal holidays would be: The Feast of the Circumcision (no Beavis and Butthead jokes), Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Monday, The Ascension, andThe Feast of the Assumption of Mary. Most people would, of course, use those days to spend time with family and do mostly non-religious things, along with some religious things.
Would you claim that the holidays weren’t religious? That the government wasn’t favoring one religion over the others? What difference does it make if it’s 1 holiday, 2 holidays or 10 holidays? It’s picking one religion, Christianity, and making its holiday(s) special.
Don’t misunderstand me. I’m OK with this. But let’s not pretend that we’re not being hypocritical about how we evaluate this action wrt the first amendment and the Lemon test.
Let me add one more thing about Church attendance. More people go to Church on Christmas, regardless of what day it’s on, than on any random Sunday (except maybe Easter).
And for those who like anecdotes… I live in a quiet area that happens to be a block from a Church. It’s Monday evening, and you can’t park within 3 blocks of my house right now.
Christmas is a Christian holiday, plain and simple. It may have secular aspect to it, but it remains an important Christmas holiday.
Merry Christmas, everyone! 
If you’re going to edit your posts, could you try and make them make sense while you’re at it? I have no idea what you mean by “those facts,” and I don’t know what the likeliest antecedents there (“December 25th was just made and has real economic benefits”) mean, so I have no idea to replace “them” (whatever they are) or how to respond to “that” (whatever “that” is).
[QUOTE=5 USC § 6103]
(a) The following are legal public holidays:
New Year’s Day, January 1.
Birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., the third Monday in January.
Washington’s Birthday, the third Monday in February.
Memorial Day, the last Monday in May.
Independence Day, July 4.
Labor Day, the first Monday in September.
Columbus Day, the second Monday in October.
Veterans Day, November 11.
Thanksgiving Day, the fourth Thursday in November.
Christmas Day, December 25.
[/QUOTE]
What is this “President’s Day” of which you speak?
Why in the world would a non-Christian celebrate Christmas?
A feast, gift exchange & get-together with the family aren’t good enough reasons? Outside of the gifts that pretty much describes Thanksgiving, and that’s popular too.
Liberals? What do they have to do with it?
Damn, they did away with Lincoln’s Birthday as a legal holiday? That sucks.
Lincoln’s Birthday was never a federal holiday.