In the Dec. 13 issue of The Collegian Magazine, there was an article by Courtney Cairns titled "Of Holiday Symbols." I could see many valid points that she made, but I still walked away from the article very angry.

If anyone were to suggest that Jews celebrate Passover with electric lights, reindeer and a big fat guy and just glaze over the story of the Exodus, any rabbi worth his salt would throw a fit.

It is wrong to perjure a religious holiday to the point where it loses all its meaning simply for the purpose of keeping everybody content. It might be better not to have any public displays or celebration at all than to water the message of Christ's birth down to a technicality. Christians could celebrate the day in the privacy of their own homes and every one else could have a vacation day.

Ms. Cairns is right; Christmas is a Christian holiday. Nobody ever said it was anything else. If the Christmas tree offends people that much, then just take it down and don't put anything in its place. Better that than to try and compensate by stripping ever religious ornament off the tree, sticking a menorah on one side, a big Islamic crescent moon on the other and putting a statuette of Vishnu on top instead of a star. By the time you're done with that you've made a public declaration against the truth of any of the religions you're trying to support.

Beyond any of that, I think it's worth to point out that Hanukkah is a relatively minor Jewish holiday. The Hanukkah story is a miraculous one, but it's just not as important a holiday as Passover or Yom Kippur. Trying to make it as important to Jews as Chirstmas is to Christians is at best purely pragmatic.

If the school opts to put up festive decorations for Passover, Yom Kippur or Ramadan, at their respective times of the year, I'll be all in favor.

Decorating the campus with other religious symbols at Christmastime, just for the sake of doing it,subordinates those religions to Christianity; it would be like Christians celebrating the birth of Mohammed, just so as not to be left out.

I think it would be best to celebrate Christmas as Christ's Mass, Easter as the Day of the Resurrection, Passover as the Commemoration of the Exodus, etc., without pretending that they're something else. If we can't do that, then we shouldn't have any public celebration at all.