THE FORBIDDEN WORD

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Here in Phoenix, Airheadzona, there’s a shopping center located at the intersection of 43rd Avenue and Thunderbird called Deer Valley Center. If you’ve never been in Phoenix, all you’re missing is one huge patchwork quilt of strip malls covered in subdued earth tone paints peeling from 118 degree heat. “Come for the beauty, stay for the weather!”

Deer Valley Center is like all of our other strip malls - it includes a Starbucks, a Blockbuster, a Hi-Health, a Blimpie sandwich shop, a bar and grill, a new age store, a shuttered Mervyn’s, and an assortment of mom and pop establishments gone or going “out of business.” There’s also a Hallmark card shop. Hallmark recently announced its intention to begin marketing wedding cards expressly designed for same-sex marriages (for “When You Care Enough To Send The Most Perverted”).

While at this shopping center recently, I noticed that, in keeping with this festive time of year, the property manager or an association of business owners had attached three types of banners to the light standards throughout the parking lot. The blue banners simply say “Happy Holidays.” There’s a red banner that just says “Season’s Greetings.” But the third type of banner, also red, contains the following seven salutations:

Feliz Navidad

Feliz Natal

Season’s Greetings

Bon Natale

Frohliche Weinachten

Joyeux Noel

Happy Hanukkah

Since all of my readers are highly observant and politically astute, I know there’s no need for me to point out the one missing expression of the season; it is so obvious due to its omission amongst every other conceivable form of greeting that it sticks out like a fat man in a bright red, white fur-festooned suit. Hokey-Smoke and Hoo-Wee! Talk about trying to ignore a red-nosed elephant in the room!

Not for a moment do I believe that the phrase in question was merely overlooked, because it is an expression that is so common it is found on nearly every person’s lips at this time of year. When every one of the season’s greetings has been included, with just this single exception, then I KNOW that there was a conscious decision made to avoid saying "IT."

I'm referring, of course, to . . .

HAPPY KWANZAA !

Well, I for one think it is a real shame that here in 2008 - even after the country has elected its first African-American to the presidency - that we should be so reluctant to observe such an important and meaningful holiday like Kwanzaa. How could the property manager of the Deer Valley Center have so blatantly dissed Black Americans in this way? Apparently, racism is still alive in the U.S.A. (It’s kinda like that pesky Communism, it just won’t go completely away.) Well, it’s the Deer Valley Center’s bad and none of my own; dogged if I’m gonna dis my African-American Brothers and Sisters. And so . . .

. . . this being the first day of that special holiday, I want to take this opportunity to wish you all a MERRY HAPPY and AUTHENTIC KWANZAA !

This also being the 26th of December, the Birthday that I’ve been celebrating all this month has come and gone, and so, if you’ll excuse me now, I’m going outside to remove the CHRISTM— uhm… the “Winter Holiday” lights from my house.

~ Stephen T. McCarthy
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