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In American English, has the phrase "holiday season", to refer to the Christmas season, been around for a long while?

I assumed it was a recent politically correct invention to avoid mentioning the dominant religion in the United States. But ngrams has "holiday season" and "Christmas season" reasonably close to each other for as long as they've been used (going back to the 19th century). Am I mis-interpreting ngrams, is there another use of "holiday season", or has the phrase been used for a long time?

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I've certainly heard the term since I was a kid, and that's not a short time ago. The song The Holiday Season is copyright 1963, and I'm sure the term goes back much further than that. (There is no conspiracy, sorry.)

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From a collection of reviews of plays staged in England, A View of the English Stage: Or, a Series of Dramatic Criticisms by William Hazlitt (1821), this from a review datelined "Covent-Garden December 28, 1816":

This is the second time that we have seen an actor fail in this character, not by any fault in himself, but by the fault of the Managers, in bringing them out in this part in the holiday season.

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  • So what does that prove? If when referring to a football match I happen to call it a sporting event - and two hundred years from now there is some daft trend where football matches are referred to as sporting events, will my reference of 2015 be seen to have been emblematic of that change? In my view Christmas ought to be called CHRISTMAS, and all these anodyne alternatives strike me as pathetic.
    – WS2
    Commented Nov 14, 2015 at 9:38
  • @WS2: True, this is just one of the examples; the OP's ngrams citation is the much more powerful evidence that the daft trend of calling everything one dislikes "PC gone mad" can't be justified in this case. Not that justifying it has ever been important to the people who do it anyway.
    – T.J. Crowder
    Commented Nov 14, 2015 at 12:03
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In the United States, the holiday season begins with Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday in November. Christmas follows, then New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. Latinos celebrate El Dia de los Reyes (Three Kings' Day) on January 6. Other minor church holidays also occur. Somewhere in there, the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah arrives and lasts eight days. But even leaving out this occasion, there are three or four major holidays and some minor ones in the late fall/early winter holiday season.

Of course, people might be deliberately vague when they don't know whether or not their audience celebrates Christmas, but the term holiday season is totally valid.

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