This Season, Greetings Are at Issue

In pre-Colonial days, English authorities looked on the holiday as a riot of drunkenness and hooliganism. American Puritans rejected it completely, preferring to get up and go to work. Not until the 1820s and '30s, with the holiday "getting rowdier and rowdier and more destructive," did Americans redefine it as a safe and private family time, Restad said -- the "old-fashioned Christmas" celebrated in carols and Currier & Ives prints.

Karal Ann Marling, author of "Merry Christmas! Celebrating America's Greatest Holiday," called complaints about secularization "complete and utter bunk."

"If you think Christmas meant the baby Jesus in the past, it didn't," said Marling, a professor of art history at the University of Minnesota.

Still, the last 20 years have seen a corporate trend toward generic holiday celebrations -- brought about not through the law, since private businesses are free to decorate as they like, but by a desire not to offend, a retail expert said.

At Cary Towne Center, a mall just outside Raleigh, displays featured azure and white artificial trees, massive suspended ornaments and flakes of iridescent plastic which, from a distance, bore a resemblance to snow.

Heather Vandeusen, manager at the Body Shop, which sells skin-care products, said off-site managers train her staff to say "Happy Holidays."

"If my corporate allowed it, I wouldn't have a problem with it," said Vandeusen, 20. "I still say 'Merry Christmas,' personally."

A major shift took place in the 1990s, when corporations became sensitive to complaints of customers on both ends of the political spectrum, said Russell Sway, international president of the Institute of Store Planners, an Atlanta-based association of design and merchandising specialists.

"On the one hand, you have a board of directors who's yelling at you for doing anything that offends anyone. On the other hand, you have this group that's yelling at you for commercializing a religious holiday," Sway said.

Wooden and his congregation -- whose church building has a cherry-red "Merry Christmas" banner hanging across its front like a political slogan -- aim to push back against that spirit of caution.

On the day after Thanksgiving, the church ran a full-page advertisement in the Raleigh News and Observer, urging Christians to "spend their hard-earned dollars with merchants who include the greeting Merry Christmas."