This is how the Grinch quit city council.
A New Jersey councilwoman resigned from her post a day after her fellow lawmakers voted to call the city’s holiday tree lighting a Christmas tree lighting.
“I cannot in good conscience continue to be part of a council that is exclusionary or to work with a Mayor who is such,” Roselle Park Councilwoman Charlene Storey wrote in her resignation letter.
The body voted 4-2 Thursday night to change the name of the town’s tree unveiling ceremony from “Annual Holiday Tree Lighting” to “Annual Christmas Tree Lighting.”
The vote overturned a previous vote to make the festivities more inclusive: In the 1990s, the city took Christmas out of the title.
But calling the ceremony surrounding the decorated, star-capped pine a Christmas tree lighting “cuts non-Christians out of the loop” and puts “religion back into the public event,” Storey said in
a statement to the Roselle Park News.
“There are also many other philosophies and religions outside of Christianity,” she wrote. “Changing the name … clearly disrespects them all and hijacks the tree lighting for one religion.”
Storey, who grew up Catholic but now considers herself a “non-believer,” said the four people who voted to change the name are Christians active in their churches.
“So I find it hard to accept that to them, a 'Christmas' tree is a secular tree,” she wrote.
Storey said the Thursday night vote came as a complete surprise: Mayor Carl Hokanson mentioned the proposed change in passing a few days earlier, but the resolution was not on the meeting’s agenda.
Other lighting ceremonies around the nation — such as Washington, D.C.’s National Christmas Tree Lighting and New York City’s Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree Lighting — have long used the religious word.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nat...its-christmas-tree-lighting-article-1.2456331
Merry Christmas...don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out!!!
