Did my post attack Jews, or Hannukah, or Hannukah songs? No!
I expressed some bafflement as to why ANY Hannukah song would be added to the program when there weren’t ANY Christmas songs on the program. “Jingle Bells” and “Frosty the Snowman” are NOT Christmas songs. They don’t even MENTION Christmas. If the choir was merely hoping not to offend Jewish employees by singing Christmas songs, they’d ALREADY achieved that by sticking to purely secular songs about snow.
Why include a Hannukah song for “balance” when there weren’t any Christmas songs performed in the first place?
Because most everyone in the US would put “Jingle Bells” and “Frosty” on the list of Christmas songs. IMO, the fact that they aren’t overtly religious doesn’t matter as much as you think it does.
A little checking tends to corroborate this statement. The placing of menorahs on public property seems to have mostly been a project of the Lubavitch sect, which is into heavily proselytizing fellow Jews, and mainstream Jewish leaders have opposed the intrusion of all religious symbols into the public square, including Jewish ones.
This article however suggests that some Jews are more “tolerant” of menorah displays, which stinks in my opinion.
Public trees without religious symbols are fine by me, since I see them as celebrating the solstice and not having an overt religious message.*
*We’re not going to have a traditional tree this year, although I am planning to decorate a four-foot indoor banana tree.
