Wish Me A Merry Christmas - Million Button Goal: Letter to Retailers

You don't need to wait until we reach our Million Button Goal. Take action now by downloading one of these letters (from individual, from church) for your local store manager. Fill it in and drop it off in person. Change your community today!

Upon reaching the Million Button Goal, the Wish Me A Merry Christmas Campaign will directly contact the Top 30 Retailers in the nation. One of our means of contact is through a letter. The following is an excerpt from the letter retailers will receive:

To Those Who Have Caused Concern:

Every year, billions of dollars are spent in your stores by consumers who purchase Christmas gifts, Christmas decorations, and other Christmas paraphernalia.

Every year, 96% of Americans set aside December 25th as a day to be spent with family, friends, and loved ones in the name of Christmas.

Every year, schools let out, shops close down, and our nation takes a day off to celebrate Christmas.

Yet every year, you concern many of us more and more with your policies of removing Christmas from your stores.

Throughout the month of December, Christmas is celebrated by name at office parties, in school plays, through cultural events, as well as in churches. Yet it has been a growing trend among retailers in our nation to remove Christmas from the public realm, pushing it farther behind closed doors, and limiting it to an event that can only be recognized privately. We feel that you have contributed to this confinement of Christmas in one or more of the following ways:

• instructing your employees to revert to the generic “Happy Holidays” and not permitting them to wish your customers “Merry Christmas” for fear of offending someone;
• removing the word “Christmas” from holiday signage in your stores and, again, replacing it with generic “Holiday” signs;
• limiting the music played in your stores during Christmas to secular holiday songs (e.g. “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer” or “Frosty the Snowman”) and removing the sacred carols and more traditional melodies of the Christmas season (e.g. “Silent Night,” “Away in a Manger”), or merely playing the wordless version of these songs.

In response to these trends, the national Wish Me A Merry Christmas Campaign was started this year to give a voice to American consumers who want to see Christmas publicly returned to the holiday season. We are pleased to inform you that over 1 million consumers have purchased buttons that say, “It’s OK, Wish Me A Merry Christmas” to date.

You must recognize, then, that these 1 million buttons represent a significant portion of the 96% of Americans who celebrate Christmas. This letter comes from 1 million of your patrons, asking that you respect their wishes by bringing “Christmas” back into your stores.

To this end, we are specifically suggesting that you:

• Train your employees to wish customers "Merry Christmas" by default;
• Return the words “Christmas” and “Merry Christmas” to the signage in your stores, along with other symbols reminiscent of Christmas, such as the colors red and green, Christmas trees, Bethlehem stars, Christmas bells and angels.
• Reinstate Christmas music in your stores, especially Christmas carols with the words.

For more information about the Wish Me A Merry Christmas Campaign or to speak with a Christmas Marketing Specialist, please call (800) 487-7137 or visit our website at www.wmamc.com.

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