Here’s a snippet from a profound article by Kevin Seamus Hasson, from the 12/20 edition of the Wall Street Journal. Read the full article here.

When Christmas Was Banned in Massachusetts

… here we are, nearly 400 years later [since the Pilgrims outlawed the public celebration of Christmas in Massachusetts in 1621], still debating whether to allow religious holidays out in public or, God forbid, on public property. Some alarmists fear public display of any faith tradition but their own. Others seek to paper over the nation’s diversity of traditions by insisting on a homogenized, religion-free culture. (If they had lived in Plymouth Colony, no doubt their answer to Christmas would have been to ban Thanksgiving, too.)

All the alarmists agree on this much, though: Others’ holiday celebrations are tolerable only in private, and never in the public square—a vintage 1621 solution. “Ah, but you see,” they all say, “religion in public is uniquely divisive. That’s why the Constitution restricts it.”

Nonsense. Elsewhere in the world, people fight and even slaughter each other over ethnic differences at least as much as they do over religious ones. And our Constitution bars government ethnic preferences just as stringently as it does religious ones. Yet our courts are not clogged with English-Americans seeking to enjoin St. Patrick’s Day parades. It’s obvious that municipal embrace and even sponsorship of them is not a harbinger of ethnic cleansing to come. It’s simply government acknowledgment of one of many ethnic elements in our culture.

There’s no reason—constitutional or otherwise—why governments cannot do the same and welcome public displays of menorahs, Christmas trees, nativity scenes and the like as simply some of the many religious elements in our culture.

Four hundred years is plenty long enough. Let’s climb out of the 17th century and call a halt to the Christmas wars.

Well said! Read the full article here.