CHRISTMAS Train!!!

If you saw a phantasmic locomotive whipping along the L tracks all decked out in tinkling lights and fairly reeking of reindeer musk, you were not hallucinating. Or maybe you were, and this just played right into your little reverie.

It was the CTA's official Holiday Train, spreading the spirit of the season several days a week leading up to "the Holidays."

This train (or more properly, its name) raises the suddenly spiky issue of how to greet people of undetermined religious orientation: i.e., the spreading use of an inclusive "Happy Holidays" being set upon and bludgeoned by Christian conservatives with their "Merry Christmas."

As a goy bridging the gulf between gentiles and Jews one mostly-kosher wife at a time - and as a lapsed Methodist teaching cultural relativism to mostly Catholic collegians - let me take a stab at this whole venom-fest.

» Any L train with red and green lights is a goddamn Christmas train.
» "Happy Holidays" is the most appropriate greeting for a period characterized by the convergence of Christmas, New Year's (in several flavors), Hanukkah, the Hajj (at least this year), and (whatever you think of it) Kwanzaa and for a country whose citizens are apt to celebrate two or more of them.

Ho ho ho.