Organized or institutional religion as the Roman Catholic Church is in the background in the 2019 European film, Hope Gap. Even with such names as Grace and Angela, religious connotations are present. In fact, the film can be interpreted, at least in part, as a critique on religion in general and Catholicism in particular. The medium of film can indeed play a vital role in critiquing sacred cows from the vantagepoint of an oblique angle or a safe distance.
The full essay is at "Hope Gap."
In the United States, Christmas is the last official holiday of the calendar-year, and Thanksgiving is the penultimate holiday. New Year’s Day is the first holiday of the year. Any other holidays among or between these are private rather than public holidays, and thus the public is not obliged to recognize those holidays as if they were equivalent to public holidays. Although New Year’s Day has remained safe from ideological attack, neither Thanksgiving nor Christmas have. Nevertheless, their status as official U.S. holidays has remained, at least as of 2025, and thus it remains as of then at least proper and fitting for Americans to refer to those holidays by name rather than by the denialist, passive-aggressive expression, happy holidays, which conveniently disappears even from retail clerks just in time for New Year’s because that holiday is ideologically permissible. The problem writ large is the influx of ideology trying to invalidate certain official United States holidays. By the end of 2025, the initial influx had triggered a counter-influx that is just as ideological, and thus only encircling certain (but not all) official holidays with ideology. The underlying fault lies in using the creation of a holiday to promote an ideology.
The full essay is at "Holidays at U.S. Parks."