That the anniversary of Joseph Smith's birth on 23 December 1805 is, not uncommonly (though also not always), mentioned in Mormon services and/or classes during the run-up to Christmas doesn't bother me even slightly. I honor and respect him.
In fact, mostly because we just wanted an excuse to have friends over but also partly because we thought his birthday was being overlooked, my wife and I have hosted a Joseph Smith birthday party on 23 December for the past ten or fifteen years, to which we invite a few couples that (with one exception) we know from the old days in the Cairo Egypt Branch, along with their (now mostly grown) children. We eat a Middle Eastern meal, exchange white elephant gifts, and sing . . . choral Christmas anthems. (As luck would have it, all of these people are very serious singers and musicians -- one has a Ph.D. in music composition, another sang soprano solo at Carnegie Hall, and so forth-- so it's a lot of fun. ) Only once did we actually do something related to Joseph Smith: We invited my friend
Scott Faulring over . . . to talk about Christmas customs among the Saints in Joseph Smith's day.
I've attended a few "missionary farewell" sacrament meetings in which, while we learned a lot about how cute the soon-to-leave missionary was when he was a child and what a fine quarterback he was in high school, we've heard distressingly little about Christ or any principle of his gospel. I freely grant that worship services in this lay church don't always match my ideal of what they should be.
However, although, in my decades of serious involvement with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Joseph Smith's birthday has occasionally been mentioned during worship services, it has never come within light years of drowning out the Christmas hymns or supplanting the Christmas programs or taking over the Christmas breakfasts or replacing the Christmas trees or dominating the Christmas sermons. I've spent multiple Christmas seasons with Latter-day Saint congregations in California, Utah, Europe, and the Middle East, and, certainly in my experience, "Smithmas" is pure fiction. I've attended several Christmas concerts with the Tabernacle Choir, but have never so much as
heard of a "Smithmas" concert.
On the other hand, I'm perfectly willing to grant -- as, in fact, I did grant in the column that I published last Thursday -- that "our more extreme critics" do claim that we celebrate "Smithmas" each year. So please don't think that I was ignoring you.