A Practical Way to Say "Merry Christmas"<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\""Merry Christmas, I mean if you celebrate it," said a women to whom I'd given up my table at the coffee shop. I appreciated the mention of Christmas, even\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/davidmills\/2014\/12\/a-practical-way-to-say-merry-christmas\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A Practical Way to Say "Merry Christmas"\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\""Merry Christmas, I mean if you celebrate it," said a women to whom I'd given up my table at the coffee shop. 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{"id":1597,"date":"2014-12-24T13:45:32","date_gmt":"2014-12-24T17:45:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/davidmills\/?p=1597"},"modified":"2014-12-24T13:47:05","modified_gmt":"2014-12-24T17:47:05","slug":"a-practical-way-to-say-merry-christmas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/davidmills\/2014\/12\/a-practical-way-to-say-merry-christmas\/","title":{"rendered":"A Practical Way to Say “Merry Christmas”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Though an advocate of saying \u201cMerry Christmas,\u201d I think we might make the feeling much more practical and expressed throughout the year. By being kinder to people who serve you<\/a>, waiters in particular, for one thing. From\u00a0this week\u2019s column for Aleteia:<\/p>\n

Customers can treat waiters and fast food clerks very badly, sometimes amazingly<\/i>, jaw-droppingly, did-you-see-that badly. Some of it\u2019s just inconsiderateness or selfishness, the failure or refusal to make the small effort to see how things from their point of view, but some of it\u2019s a cowardly assault on the defenseless.<\/p>\n

Our eldest son worked for a couple years in high school and then summers after at a sandwich shop in an affluent, boutique-y little town, and dealt with obnoxious people every day. They seemed to feel that the few dollars they paid for their sandwich also paid for the right to abuse the staff. If they ordered the wrong thing, for example, the workers were at fault for not reading their minds.<\/p>\n

One summer a young woman working there became a particular target, perhaps because she was petite and polite, with people sometimes asking her how stupid she could be. Her co-workers at the cash register end of the line enjoyed telling them, \u201cYou know, she\u2019s a classics major at Harvard. She sight-reads ancient Greek and Latin.\u201d My son told me that the abusive customers were not always suitably abashed.<\/p>\n

There follows seven practical ways<\/a> to say \u201cMerry Christmas\u201d to your waiter, and not just at Christmas \u2014 ways to \u201cdo unto others\u201d in this particular matter. Waiters represent all those over whom we as customers have some power, if only to make their work harder.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"