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This is a statement of an ideal, but it doesn't always work out that way in practice. Particularly in America, people expect to see certain patriotic (and occasionally religious) observances which they see as non-political, but other people see as political. And in many such cases this ambiguity was created deliberately for political purposes.
To take an example that is now sufficiently out-of-date that it doesn't matter any more, the people who normalised the flying of the POW-MIA flag alongside the US flag intended to make a political point by doing so - namely that the US should not normalise the relationship with (notionally communist but, like China, not particularly USSR-aligned) Vietnam until Vietnam did more to ensure the return of Vietnam War POWs and MIAs. But in the current year, someone who said that flying the POW-MIA flag was an anti-Vietnamese statement would attract funny looks.
"Under God" in the pledge of allegiance has a similar history. The conservatives who amended Bellamy's original pledge to add "under God" in 1954 were making a political point about American Christianity vs Soviet atheism. But Michael Newdow was widely attacked (and probably justifiably so) for making the pledge unnecessarily political in 2002.
In contrast, singing the national anthem before football games really was non-politically patriotic in an uncomplicated way until Colin Caepernik messed things up to make his political point. [That isn't a fact of live, it's a statement about American politics at a specific time. Singing the Spanish national anthem at the start of a Barcelona-Real Madrid or God Save the Queen at a Rangers-Celtic match would start a fight]
You can see a similar argument with e.g. confederate symbols in State flags, explicitly Christian Christmas decorations in quasi-public buildings, and Donald Trump making a partisan political speech at the White House Easter Egg Hunt. Scott Alexander had an excellent blog post built around the idea that flying the pride flag in San Francisco is no more or less political than flying the stars and stripes in Peoria.
Was St Patrick's Day a "made up political holiday" and if so when did it stop being one? Celebrating it was controversial back in the day when assimilation of white ethnic immigrants was a live political issue.
Sports are an expression of local identity, and if that wasn't political in mid-20th century America that was a highly contingent fact about history. A Bowl game between Ole Miss and Notre Dame would have been at least as political as the Old Firm derby if such a thing had happened in the 1880s.
I am trying to think of a time when music wasn't commonly political and/or religious, and I'm coming up blank. Both sides of the aisle thought that rock music was political back when it was controversial.
The first feature-length film ever made was, by some definitions, Birth of a Nation. So movies were frequently political, and sometimes explicitly so, from the start.
Columbus day is political today, obviously, but when it was first introduced, it was political in a different direction- it was pro-italian.
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All holidays are technically made up, and most actual Irish are rather bemused by the holiday as they see it as more of a thanksgiving kind of holiday rather than a “get drunk off your arse on green beer” holiday. It’s probably not controversial anymore mostly because who doesn’t want to cut loose and get drunk on a saint’s day?
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The answer is that after there wasn't any more discrimination against Irish, they didn't shut down the St. Patrick's Day parade or repurpose it to be about all countries that start with the letter "I", and at that point it was no longer political.
If 50 years later the anti-Israel movement started complaining about the St. Patricks Day Parade (without it actually changing) because being about the Irish normalizes dealing with countries that start with the letter "I", that wouldn't suddenly make it political again.
Movies were political. But being political wasn't required procedure. They made political movies, but they made nonpolitical movies too.
The whole reason we have "this isn't political, this is just decency" is that people know very well that it was the norm to limit your politics, and that they are trying to find a way to evade this norm.
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