Bah humbug.
As ice and snow blankets southern Ontario, it really is beginning to feel a lot like Christmas. Shovels are clacking. People are cursing. Cars are crashing. And Rob Ford can finally grow his beard and go back to his day job at the North Pole.
Yup, it's Christmas.
I don't believe in Santa (I prefer to celebrate Festivus), but as I slipped along a street dodging falling branches a miracle happened:
A complete stranger wished me a "Merry Christmas."
I was taken aback. In this country of "Happy Holidays," "holiday" office parties (that for some odd reason never seem to happen between the months of January and November), and "holiday" trees and cards, wishing a complete (and racialized "non-White" Canadian) stranger Merry Christmas in public is akin to Ford telling the truth.
It just doesn't -- and won't -- happen.
As I returned the greeting I wondered: since when did "Merry Christmas" become a political statement especially in multicultural Canada?
Multiculturalism is a complete and utter failure in Canada when it is politically incorrect to say "Merry Christmas." Yes, I said it. By all means, the debate on the merits of multiculturalism can rage back and forth under a plethora of different issues, but since Christmas is only a few days away, this is something that all of us need to sit back under our holiday trees, take a sip of our holiday egg nog and ponder.
When was the last time you told someone you didn't know "Merry Christmas" without pausing and wondering if they may or may not be offended?
My stance doesn't have anything to do with race, or colour, or culture, or even religion.
Why?
Due to little historical events like slavery, colonization, the Inquisition, and right here in our own backyard, Residential Schools, there are Christians in Canada of all colours, cultures, races, and ethnicities that celebrate Christmas.
In our haste to be inclusive, we have simultaneously excluded the sameness in our diversity.
We have created a society where it is more appropriate to let children sit on strange men's laps, tell them that home invasions are completely acceptable if your name is Santa and if it's done on Christmas Eve, tell them reindeer fly, and buy a six-year-old a $700 game console.
But we can't send that same six-year-old to school with a pack of Christmas cards to wish his classmates a Merry Christmas.
Yes, I understand that Christianity is on a steady decline in Canada; however, in a country where the Middle Class will soon cease to exist, and where nobody seems to know (or care) how the next generation is going to pay for their retirement, we would rather say the true meaning of X-Mas is actually a day of rest for Boxing Day store sales, while we plunge further and further into the abyss we call consumer debt, as opposed to calling it what it is:
A Christian holiday.
Again, in our haste to be inclusive and politically correct, we have done away with Nativity scenes and bought LED holiday lights from Canadian Tire.
In our haste to be diverse and secular, we have done away with one religion and occupied another:
Wal-Martianity.
ALSO ON HUFFPOST:
