A must read today is Jeff Jacoby, writing in The Boston Globe, on "De-Christmasing Christmas." Boston has outdone itself this year, and in reading Jacoby's column it's clear that nobody wants responsibility for that.
WHEN A commotion erupted over the fact that the 48-foot white spruce installed on the Boston Common -- an annual gift from the people of Nova Scotia -- is identified on Boston's official website as a ''holiday tree," the city's commissioner of parks and recreation sided firmly with the critics. ''This is a Christmas tree," Antonia Pollak declared. ''It's definitely a Christmas tree."
At least that's what she told the Boston press. According to CBC News, on the other hand, she took a rather different line with the Canadian press: ''A lot of people celebrate various religious holidays but also enjoy the lights, and we're trying to be inclusive."
Meanwhile, Pollak's boss said he intends to call it a Christmas tree, no matter what it says on the City Hall website. ''I didn't write the website," Boston Mayor Thomas Menino told the Boston Herald. ''If I had, it would have said Christmas tree." He must not write the mayor's weekly column, either. The current one is about the lighting of Christmas trees all over Boston -- yet not once does the word ''Christmas" modify the word ''tree."
And so it begins again -- the annual effort to neuter Christmas, to insist in the name of ''inclusiveness" and ''sensitivity" that a Christian holiday celebrated by something like 90 percent of Americans not be called by its proper name or referred to in religious terms.
Mr. Jacoby hits the nail on the head here:
But mostly, I think, this attempt to fade Christmas into a nondenominational winter holiday stems from a twisted notion of courtesy -- from the idea that tolerance and respect for minorities require intolerance and disrespect for the majority.
Lest you think Mr. Jacoby an angry fundamentalist, read on:
As a practicing Jew, I don't celebrate Christmas. There is no Christmas tree in my home, my kids don't write letters to Santa Claus, and I don't attend church on Dec. 25 (or any other date). Does the knowledge that scores of millions of my fellow Americans do all those things make me feel excluded or offended? On the contrary: It makes me feel grateful -- to live in a land where freedom of religion shelters the Hanukkah menorah in my window no less than the Christmas tree in my neighbor's.
For Mr. Jacoby this is almost an annual ritual - he wrote a similar column last year, "A Jew says Merry Christmas."
11/30/05 2010: It looks like Lowe's is firmly in the "Christmas is OK" camp, after an oversight. And Massachusetts is going the opposite direction of the US Capitol, where at Speaker Hastert's direction the "holiday" tree is now once again a Christmas tree.
