NEW YORK, December 19, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – The Christmas season is bringing to the surface a heated debate inside the American society over religious conservatism.

Conservatives are threatening lawsuits and boycotts to insist that store clerks and advertisements say "Merry Christmas" while others argue they are being inclusive and inoffensive with the secular "Happy Holidays," Reuters reported.

Sparks flew when President George W. Bush sent out cards referring to the "holiday season," and a leading Republican declared the decorated tree on the Capitol lawn a "Christmas Tree" and not a "Holiday Tree."

A school system in Texas found itself in court after teachers asked children to bring white -- rather than red and green -- napkins to a party, while Annapolis, Maryland, raised hackles by calling its evergreen boughs and ribbons on public buildings the "Hanging of the Greens" rather than "Christmas decorations."

Fanning the flames are conservative talk show personalities bemoaning the secularization of Christmas.

Fox News anchor John Gibson chimed in with a book "The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday is Worse than You Thought."

Manuel Zamorano, head of the Sacramento, California-based Committee to Save Merry Christmas, maintains that "Happy Holidays" and "Season's Greetings" are not a substitute for "Merry Christmas".

"Christmas is the holiday and 'Merry Christmas' is what we want to hear," he said.

"It's political correctness gone amok."

Zamorano's organization is organizing store boycotts over holiday advertising.

Retailers are finding themselves in an unenviable situation as their seasonal selling campaigns seem to raise particular wrath.

"When someone says 'Happy Holidays,' they're saying something very nice to you. There's no ill intent behind any of this," said Dan Butler of the National Retail Federation.

"When you're dealing with the public you'll get positive comments and negative comments about everything in the world."

Perhaps, says Peter Steinfels of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University, there is not a war on Christmas after all but a more sensitive religious right.

"The more they stir up their evangelical Christian base over this issue, the more likely they are to get out and vote Republican in 2006," said Press.

Radio talk show host Bill Press said people have been saying "Happy Holidays" for "a hundred years at least".

"This is nothing new. It just celebrates the diversity of America."

The author of "How the Republicans Stole Christmas" heaped blames on politics.

"It is all by design," he said. "The more people are talking about who's saying 'Happy Holidays' and who's saying 'Merry Christmas,' the less people are talking about Karl Rove, torture, Tom DeLay, the war in Iraq and other hot issues."

He went on: "And the more they stir up their evangelical Christian base over this issue, the more likely they are to get out and vote Republican in 2006".

John Danforth, a former US ambassador to the UN and a three-term senator, has charged that Bush was bowing to the rightists.

Pundits have further said that appoints made by Bush after his reelection in 2004 demonstrated that his administration had drifted towards the neoconservatives, putting an end to the genial moderation presented by some politicians like former secretary of state Colin Powell.

Bidding to win the knife-edge presidential race with Democrat candidate John Kerry, Bush played the religion card, working hard to show to the American people, many of whom have firm religious convictions, his religious commitment.

By the last of the memos, the increasingly beleaguered company is forced to apologize to its Jewish employees, the office alcoholics, Muslims, dieters, pregnant women, union members, management, diabetics and vegetarians. In the end, the party is canceled.