The Incredible Disappearing Christmas

You may have heard that Christmas is under seige. (Old school readers may remember that I've posted on this before.) The attentive are noticing that public and private institutions, whether consciously or not, are increasingly omitting "Christmas" from the Christmas season. The single reason for this, of course, is the holiday's namesake: Christ. The PC police long ago started removing religious references (usually Christian) from everything in order not to "offend" some miniscule minority of over-sensitive activists. That's why we have "holiday" parties and "season's greetings," rather than Christmas parties and hearty "Merry Christmas!"-es in public anymore. Sad, but apparently true. I'll post later on Wilmington's excessively lame "holiday" tree.

Speaking of trees, as this year's season of Christmas whitewashing started heating up and the media began their largely sarcastic reporting on it, I came across this article in the Washington Post. The story is about the politics behind the lighting of three of the country's best known Christmas trees: the White House, Capitol, and Rockefeller Plaza trees. The Post, not surprisingly, fell into the same de-Christmasing of Christmas trap everyone seems to fall into these days. The Post's treatment of the story on the web is the better story than the subject of the article.

When I first clicked on the story, the headline read: "Three holiday trees, only one star".

The next time I clicked on it (same day), the headline read: "Three Christmas trees, only one star".

I'll stop here to mention that the day this article appeared the outcry on the subject was particularly rabid. Fox News that morning had reported that Boston's tree would be renamed a "holiday" tree and talking heads were in a frenzy and articles on the subject were popping up everywhere. As the foregoing makes apparent, the WaPo itself couldn't decide what to call these large, festively decorated pine trees that stand in prominent spots in cities across the country during only one consumer-crazy month a year. Gosh, what the heck are they?

The solution for the Post's editors, it seems, was to just give up. The headline now reads: "Three trees, and only one star".

Absurd. Can't we all agree to call these glittery wooden seasonal mainstays "Christmas trees" because, let's just admit it, everyone knows that's what they are?!