I didn't think I'd get embroiled in this holiday's controversy de jour, the recoil against the politically correct "season's greetings". I'm not often in the politically correct camp. I think George Carlin is right that PC language - and Seattle suffers from it acutely - is too often just a smiley face bandage covering an infection, or a cheap route to displays of sensitivity.

Then I saw the enemy and it was me.

"Merry, er, seasons, uh, greetings," I said to Tim McKenzie at the Ballard Food Bank, while dropping off a Christmas basket from the News-Tribune.

"Thank you, I will have a Merry Christmas. You do the same," he tactfully reproached.

How did I come to this? How long had I been saying "seasons greetings" and why did my "Merry Christmas" get packed away with the old wrapping paper? It had been so for a long time.

I used "Merry Christmas" in Spokane, where I grew up. But by the time I moved to New York, in the early 1990s, I traded the phrase for "season's greetings" because it wasn't including enough of the people I cared about. Christmas itself wasn't the problem, Christ was.

In my youth, I was taught about the wrath of God and his army of angels. It was always pay-back time in Heaven, against unbelievers and anyone outside the flexible halo of godliness. Bible school taught the bible in reverse; starting with Revelations and lingering there until I was too old to keep going. Christmas wasn't a strongly religious holiday for my family but those tidings of "comfort and joy" were never too far away: "Remember Christ our savior was born on Christmas day / To save us all from Satan's power when we had gone astray."

Then I moved and Spokane's cultural monotony was replaced by what seems like the whole world, traveling to work with me every morning in a subway car. By the time I'd been there a year, my three best friends were 1) Hindu 2) Jewish and 3) Gay: all unequivocally on the other side of the lake of fire. Wishing them a Merry Christmas seemed insensitive at best, maybe even menacing.

But in throwing away "Merry Christmas" I was engaging in the worst part of political correctness: its oversimplification.

If I didn't have the faith to know the actions I made on my friends' behalfs spoke for me, a holiday phrase wasn't going to do it. I loved my friends and still do; they know that. Recasting my language disrespects that friendship.

Another oversimplification, if not overt lie, was being brought up to believe Jesus was simply an enforcer. Maybe it was all those years in the shadow of the mushroom cloud, knowing that if war did start, our only part in it would be deciding how to cower. A lifetime of impotent rage can only be redressed in Heaven.

Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.

To believe that "Merry Christmas" endorses a violent Christ is selling Jesus short, and selling many Christians short with him. Christmas can also celebrate the Christ of peace, and his mission of a life serving others. It is not unlike the mission the volunteers and staff of the Ballard Food Bank follow. I bet quite a few Christians work there, following Jesus in their way. So for them, Merry Christmas.

And Merry Christmas to you too, Tim. Sorry I'm late. Sometimes I have to think these things through.