Retail giant Wal-Mart Stores Inc. plans a “merry Christmas” this year, abandoning the generic “happy holidays” after last season’s boycott by religious organizations of stores that offered more secular greetings to their customers. (Oh, and by the way, Wal-Mart wants to increase its take of the billions of dollars in consumer holiday spending and beat everyone else in the price wars, but we’re sure the decision to put Christ back in the greeting is purely coincidental.)

The season is monumentally important for retailers, whose fourth-quarter sales can make the difference between a profit and a loss for the year. But this commingling of religion and commerce is having some curious results.

It suggests that a pluralistic society’s respect for the beliefs and traditions of non-Christians come at the expense of Christianity. It is true that the overwhelming majority of Americans – 82 percent, according to a recent Baylor University study – describe themselves as Christians, but that still leaves millions of Americans who observe other faiths or do not consider themselves religious.

It also suggests, on the most base emotional level, that extending a greeting of “merry Christmas” will somehow end the secularization of the holiday and magically make Christmas a holy day for Christians to celebrate the birth of Christ.

It won’t.

It isn’t as if pushing already record-high consumer debt to even more uncomfortable levels is a fitting non-secular tribute to a savior who was born into poverty, in a stable. Though we’re not suggesting that giving gifts at Christmastime is un-Christian, it is fair to ask if the annual crush of consumers pushing, shoving and brawling with one another in the toy aisle is truly symbolic of the gifts the three wise men presented to the savior.

Multiculturalism didn’t steal Christmas. Greed and excess did. If Christmas is a holiday to celebrate the birth of a savior to spread peace and good will toward others, we as a self-proclaimed Christian nation must epitomize those acts of charity year-round.