I am so sick of the religious zealots out there that ruin everything fun. Now a bunch of fundamentalist Christians are suing stores that use Happy Holidays not Merry Christmas. So now Happy Holidays is bad?

The company I work for decided to sponsor a tree in the local Festival of Trees. This was only the second year and it raises money for local conservation efforts. Since we are a Hollywood-themed business we decided to do a retro movie star tree using old Christmas themed publicity pictures.

One of the images was a publicity shot that was used in the early 1940s and it said “Have a Merry X-mas.” This was a widely displayed image during that time and no one threw a fit back then.

On the opening day of the event we get a call that people are complaining about the picture so the committee removed them from the tree. I tried to explain to the chairperson that you shouldn’t change the rules to please a few, but she just didn’t understand.

Then I said “If some Jews or Muslims came in and complained about the word Christ in Christmas you would not take the signs down.” She looked at me and sweetly said “Oh I don’t think it’s a religious thing, they just don’t like the look of the X on there.” I started to explain to her that this was a fundamentalist issue of taking Christ out of Christmas but realized the discussion would go right over her head.

Any way she had other issues to deal with. The event was held in the local Medical Mall and the funeral home tree in front of the Cancer Center was causing a stir. Then the Ladies' Auxillary (average age eighty-something) wanted to do something cheerful so they covered their entire tree with rainbows. I'm sure you know where this is going. The sad thing is that the little old ladies still don’t understand what everyone was up in arms about.

I ended up removing X-mas using PhotoShop and replaced it with Feliz Navidad. Maybe next year I’ll make a sign that says Have a Merry XhanukaKwanzaamas.