"THE 12 POLLS OF CHRISTMAS"

GREAT IDEA JON - ROLL ON THE FIRST !

Please view my comment on the polll. While this is a well intentioned and creative approach , it is not a universal theme and inappropriate to a site looking to attract the worldwide community.

Thanks for the comment and I appreciate and understand your position. We are nonetheless trying to ask some genuine and valid questions here (as I hope will become apparent over the course of the 12 days) whilst conducting it in a lighthearted way. I would be very sad to think this was seen as inappropriate or offensive.

Looking forward to some holiday spirit!

The first question can't be answered until after the holiday is over in my opinion.

If I can put my admin hat aside for a minute, I would like to make 2 related comments about my use of the word Christmas.

In the "12 polls of Christmas" blog, it was a play on words from a popular carol in Britain "12 days of Christmas". Its use is therefore unavoidable or the wordplay would not work. Perhaps it didn't anyway.

In the poll, my use of the word Christmas has nothing to do with personal belief/disbelief or otherwise. It is purely the fact that my calendar calls 25 December "Christmas day" and the school holidays in Britain are usually referred to as Christmas holidays. There is no endorsement of any faith over any other, either explicit or implicit, intentional or unintentional. How we spend that period of the year and what we call it is largely the result of our upbringing and cultural heritage. I call it Christmas. You may prefer to call it a different name.

Incidentally, the word holiday, being derived from holy day, probably carries as much religious overtones ...

But we are nothing if not fair. The same goes for other celebrations and holidays. In the same way that the Christmas period is associated with some degree of overeating, there is of course a Muslim festival associated with fasting. That too may have implications for symptom control and we will ask about them when that time comes. But I will say now for clarity that I shall not be calling it "holiday". We will call it by the name it's known -- Ramadan.