BUZZURRO

Wal-Mart opts for ‘Christmas’ marketing It won’t be ‘happy holidays’ this year; it will be ‘Merry Christmas’ ,the announcer announced on TV with a smile.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s Christmas cheer seems to be a hot trend this season as several other retailers including Kohl’s Corp. and Macy’s, a division of Federated Department Stores Inc., are also stepping up their Christmas marketing. The moves respond to mounting criticism from religious groups that staged boycotts against Wal-Mart and other merchants after they eliminated or de-emphasized “Christmas” in their advertising.

“We learned a lesson from that. Merry Christmas is now part of the vocabulary here at Wal-Mart,” said Linda Blakley, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman.

‘Big Deal’ I sarcastically thought. On the one hand as a consumer who doesn’t celebrate Christmas it doesn’t really concern me, but on the other hand it does, and within a few seconds I changed my thoughts to ‘That’s good news.”

Why does it concern me you ask ?

Last year many stores and public places made a big show of removing the word ‘Christmas’ from everything from store sales to trees, as if Christmas was some type of vulgar curse word.

It’s not. It’s the name of a sacred holiday in the Christian faith. Even though I do not celebrate it, I was highly offended by these actions last year. Christmas is a religious holiday for Christians. It is not n interdenominational holiday for all Americans such as Thanksgiving and should not be stripped of its religious signicance and be treated as such.

Personally I celebrate Hannukah. I would be highly offended if some marketing expert decided to call it a generic holiday for everyone instead of a special holy day for Jewish people so why should things be any different for Christians?

They were offended too by what happened last year and rightly so. I was behind them 100 percent.
I’m glad that due to their pressure things are going to be different this year.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 16th, 2006 at 7:34 pm and is filed under US News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.