Season’s Reason

With Thanksgiving behind us and Christmas on the way, we reflect again on the city council’s recent decision regarding “holiday” displays on the plaza. Readers will recall that the council voted to prohibit all “unattended displays,” which previously had been allowed with an over-the-counter permit from city hall if they did not contain religious symbols.
Council member August Sebastiani’s stated interest was to bring the crèche of his youth back to the plaza, and the council’s interest as a whole was to have a “content-neutral” policy for permitted displays. Sebastiani’s proposal brought into focus the content-judging nature of the present policy. We note that the council explicitly discounted the war protesters who have displayed signs at the head of Broadway each Friday for the past 322 weeks. Since they leave behind no displays, and even gather on the sidewalk rather than the plaza lawn, the policy would not pertain to them, in any case.
Government offices at all levels are closed for Christmas, and the vast majority of our population participates in gift giving (and receiving) on December 25. As council member Ken Brown pointed out, the city has a Christmas tree on city hall, lights Christmas trees on the plaza, and has Santa Claus riding on a city fire truck.
Santa and the trees are commonly viewed as Christian symbols, though they have only peripheral relation to the event being celebrated, namely the birth of a Jewish baby boy in a little town in Palestine, some 2,000 years ago. The tree tradition was likely brought to America by Hessian mercenaries who fought in the Revolutionary War, and the Santa Claus tradition by Dutch settlers in New York.
Of course, the incorporation of other traditions is nothing new, and even affected the official date for Jesus’ birth. The Gospels suggest it wasn’t in winter, since the “shepherds were in the fields with their flocks,” but actually, who would have thought to notice and record the date, some 30 years before the man began preaching? It was probably as Christianity was preached into early Europe that the local peoples’ celebration of the winter solstice was usurped.
So we’re left with an amalgam of traditions. But followers of Christ seek to honor, amidst the commercialization of the holidays, the true reason for Christmas, and for them, the crèche is the symbol. For the rest, the crèche can be a symbol for the message of peace and love that Jesus preached (despite the war and hate in the centuries since by men sometimes acting in his name).
It matters not to us whether the crèche display returns to the plaza for the month of December. However, we fear the council may have “thrown out the baby with the bathwater,” referring not literally to the baby Jesus, of course, but figuratively to the public art that periodically graced our plaza. The wonder of local government is that our representatives are so accessible, and accountable, and we expect that this issue will be visited again.
When that time comes, let’s recall that the council’s goal of a content-neutral display policy foundered on fears that groups such as the American Nazi Party or the Klu Klux Klan could not be denied their own swastika or noose displays. That likelihood seems remote, and the city attorney’s opinion is not necessarily the controlling or even the only one. We are reminded of the hospital saga, where there have been several “expert” opinions, often conflicting with one another, as the respected voice moved from the old administration, to the Plan B panel, to the Coalition, and now to the new administration.
We certainly are not the experts, but it would seem that the federal government actually might provide some useful guidance, as there is already a determination, for deductibility purposes under IRS Code Section 170(b)(1)(A)(i), as to which groups are bona fide churches, and which are not. That may provide a support on which the council can lean, should it seek to open the community’s plaza again to art, religious or otherwise.