It is during the busiest shopping time of the season at Bath & Body Works when I risk it all by handing back the change to a customer and quietly wish her a Merry Christmas. I’m assuming it’s safe to do so. Decked out in a red and white reindeer sweater and matching knit cap, I’ve carefully profiled this woman as an obvious supporter of Christmas. There is even a Rudolph pendant on the fabric of her sweater with a flashing nose pointing to her very breast. No way does this woman believe in Hanukkah, Kwanzaa or nothing at all. The woman smiles sweetly and makes the mistake of thanking me for respecting Jesus’s birthday before she turns and is on her way and I face the perky wrath of the store manager for not having used the generic corporate approved Happy Holidays. “Next time I’ll write you up, Paula,” my manager threatens in her sharply cut bob and bright white Keds tennis shoes.

I was an undergraduate, putting myself through school on grants, student loans and part-time shifts schlepping flowery and fruity scented shower gels and body lotions. Banning Christ made no sense then in a brightly lit store in a mall and it certainly makes none now as a professor in a classroom whose students vary from Catholics to Muslims to agnostics. Where I teach at the state university religious tolerance shockingly enough still prevails. One English professor teaches a course on the Bible as literature. Hard core Christian activists are allowed to shout self-righteously so long as they do it out of doors and don’t incite a physical altercation. Over the years as a hybrid of Greek Orthodox and the Lutheran faith, I’ve learned about Allah, the Pope and the Big Bang Theory. Some atheist students are surprised to learn they have a faith because believing in nothing, I point out, is still a belief in something.

But in other institutions the freedom to speak or write about religion is not always the case. A professor I know from a well-respected college refuses to allow the Bible as a legitimate text in his courses because the authors, he claims, are technically unknown. Really. Then I suppose that must also exclude great Christian philosophers and thinkers like St. Thomas Aquinas who rely on this book in their own writings. The professor bristles at my offhanded accusation of censorship. Not all professors, he says, get a chance to read up on everyone. He’s also one of those bah humbug types who pitches a fit at a golden menorah painted on the front window of the local bank or a Christmas nativity scene played out in the town square because he doesn’t want another person’s religious celebratory practices imposed on him, period. What he doesn’t see is the ignorance he practices daily is far more divisive and damaging than any religious one.

Why should a mistaken affiliation whether it be in regards to religion or ethnicity be so offensive anyway? As a warm-blooded, dark haired Greek I’m constantly asked here in Southern California by many people of Hispanic origin if I habla Espanol. And even once I was taken out of line at a Nashville airport and interrogated by a slow sounding (in more ways than one), TSA agent. Naturally he thought I was a Middle Eastern terrorist because I had played around dyeing my hair a deeper shade of near black and I had unintentionally packed in my carry-on a contraband snow globe with a tiny banjo in it from the Grande Ole Opry. The agent kept requesting that he see my passport even though I swore over and over again with my driver’s license in hand that I was a California native. Did I sue over my lowly mistreatment? No. I was highly insulted by his questions, by his grits and gravy breath, but then I did this strange thing some Americans have trouble doing. I simply got over it.

As a consequence of all of this hypersensitivity and political correctness, children in elementary schools are no longer allowed to celebrate any holidays. There is Harvest Time instead of Halloween. Scary rubber masks, costume contests and, well, fun are ditched in the process. Christmas Break is now a Winter one; therefore, no jolly old guy in a red suit and hat, lugging a sack full of presents will be showing up on the last day of class like he did in mine when I was in kindergarten. Last year there was a controversy over the White House calling that big, tall thing with green needles and tangle of lights they had standing in one of their great rooms as a holiday tree, not a Christmas tree. For his part, the left wing’s nemesis Bill O’Reilly defends Christmas on his program and even offers bumper stickers to that effect on his show’s site. And while I oftentimes don’t agree with him on a range of other topics, I commend him on his efforts and I wish him and everyone else who reads this a very Merry Christmas.