I am not automatically outraged when I see that people are expected to work on Christmas.
Why?
Because Christmas is a religious holiday. And it's not my religious holiday.
There are a great many Americans who are not Christian and who do not celebrate Christmas as a religious holiday.
We do kind of want to have our holy day off, though, and many of us don't get it because we're told "You're taking Christmas off and you'll like it!" Assuming we get any holiday in December at all, that is.
For most of my working life (that's 52 years, so far), I've worked Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.
The only time it bothered me to work those days was when I had to deal with the public. For some reason, people are really mean to those of us who work on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. For some reason, they blame us for being at work.
What really chaps me, though, are the people who think they ought to pity me for working on their holiday.
They say things like, "I'm so sorry you have to work on Christmas" and I'm like, "Dude, I'm really sorry you have to work on my birthday." And they go, "But your birthday isn't important to me." and I'm like "Exactly!"
Celebrating the birth of Christ is not a focal point of my life. Nice dude, said some good things, has some great stories, but ultimately, his birth is not a special day in my life. Working on Christmas is no different to me than my working any other workday of the year.
In a nation as diverse as the US, those of us who celebrate different holy days don't mind working the holy days of someone else's religion - they can work on our holy days while we take off to celebrate.
Most of you have no concept of how utterly wrong it feels to be forced to take the religious holy day of someone else's religion off while having to work on our own religious holy day. Don't pity us or apologize to us for working on your holy day when it's not our holy day.
Given a choice between working on Christmas Day and working on Cookie Day, I'd far, far rather have Cookie Day off. Cookie Day is more important and meaningful to me in a religious sense than Christmas ever was or ever will be. I would gladly work every Christmas Day if I could have every Cookie Day off.
Edited to add: This is my 800th diary here at DKos.