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Nornagest comments on Advice Request: Baconmas Website - Less Wrong
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Comments (31)
Your target audience is probably not Christian, but anything-mas is going to sound like a rip off of Christmas.
I would hesitate saying to my mother "I'm celebrating Baconmas with the kids". I'd rather say "I'm celebrating Francis Bacon Day with the kids". It's more descriptive, does not feel like an attack on Christmas, and has a natural followup question: "Who is Francis Bacon?"
The -mas suffix indicates Mass in the Christian sense, as you might have expected; so yes, it has definite religious overtones. It's not completely inappropriate if you dig deep enough into the etymology (it suggests a mission; spreading the good news, so to speak), but I'd expect relatively few people to do so.
Part of the advantage of Newtonmass is that it's a sufficiently clever joke (IMO anyway) that it becomes less about sending up Christmas than the double meaning of "mass." Or at least it can, if you explain it right.
Regardless, I don't think either Baconmas or Newtonmas or Newtonmass are actually all that offensive. My suspicion is that the sort of Christian who would get annoyed would also be annoyed at the range of politically correct holiday greetings that explicitly AVOID mentioning Christmas at all, so the reference builds Christmas' importance rather than diminishes, in some ways. Dunno. I don't know if I have a good enough model of the type of people we're concerned about here.
However, an alternative: Baconalia
Wasn't that an add campaign for Denny's?