A few weeks ago a mini-scandal broke out surrounding Ridgeway Elementary School in Wisconsin. It seemed that some official with the school play had secularized the words to the beautiful "Silent Night" (or as we Lutherans call it: "Stille Nacht") to "Cold in the Night." Various groups got enraged and sent out press releases and television networks ate it up and ran breathless segments about the war on Christmas. So Washington Post reporter Neely Tucker did something revolutionary. He picked up his telephone and called the author of the play in which "Cold in the Night" is featured. It turns out that playwright Dwight Elrich was a music director for a choir at Bel Air Presbyterian (President Reagan's church in California) for decades. The play comes with a "Christian" page which may be inserted and includes Christian Christmas songs such as "Angels We Have Heard on High."

On the one hand, Tucker pokes fun at Fox News' John Gibson and Bill O'Reilly and generally gives the impression that the war on Christmas is more perception than reality, but on the other hand he does a good job of explaining why those who feel attacked do so. Tucker does this by speaking with James P. Byrd Jr., assistant dean of the Vanderbilt University Divinity School. He contrasts what Christmas in 1950 might have seemed like to a conservative Christian with the present. Here's how Neely characterizes it:

And now you wake up and it's 2005. You go to hear the kid's Christmas play, except by the time it clears all the church-state hurdles the ACLU worries about, it sounds more like "Songs of Many Lands as Sung by 6-Year-Olds." The Christmas Tree at the Capitol in Washington, they call it a "holiday tree" most years now. Even President Bush, a devout Christian, sends out a Christmas card that does not say "Merry Christmas." Now you hear a lot about Kwanzaa, Hanukkah and "the holidays." What is to be made of all this?

Tucker provides what so few reporters -- especially those on the magic electronic box -- have done with this cable-driven war on Christmas: he provides historical context, interviewing authors of various books on the American history of Christmas. He mentions the Puritan distaste for Christmas and keeps on going:

The founding fathers had no Santa Claus (Saint Nicholas, a minor European saint, did not morph into the current image of the gift-laden Santa Claus until the 1820s). There were no Christmas trees (a German import that didn't take root until the 1840s). Dec. 25 wasn't made a federal holiday under the first 17 American presidents (including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Abraham Lincoln). The holiday did not come until 1870, under Ulysses Grant, perhaps one of the least pious of presidents.

Thank you! My one complaint, other than the inexplicable editorial "we" the author uses, is the absolutely offensive ending to the piece. Tucker makes fun of Liberty Counsel's Matt Staver for arguing that Christmas trees should not be renamed:

Historically speaking, academics and scholars agree, he's right: It is a Christmas tree.

You wonder if the Deity thinks that is the point. Or, perhaps, if it misses it entirely.

No offense, but my beloved hometown paper the Washington Post is just about the last place I look for speculation on what the "Deity" thinks about, well, anything. I mean, they could at least try refraining from mocking religious adherents for a few months before tacking on this ending. But it's still worthwhile to read.