He is not alone in his confusion. As long as local and state governments stick to illuminated evergreens and other "secular symbols" of "the winter holiday season," the U.S. Supreme Court has said, they don't have to worry about violating the First Amendment's Establishment Clause by endorsing a particular religion.

This sort of reasoning explains why the Christmas Program at my 5-year-old daughter's public school in Dallas was instead called a holiday program, at which the children sang festive holiday songs that to my untrained ear sounded a lot like Christmas carols. The school did seem to eschew songs that explicitly mention Christ (as long as you ignore the Christ in Christmas), but it still forced my wife and me to choose between 1) letting our daughter publicly celebrate a religious holiday that is not part of our tradition and 2) making her feel excluded by stopping her from joining all the other kindergartners in an official school activity that involved weeks of preparation in music class. The Christmas stocking with her name on it that she proudly brought home from school and wanted to hang above our fireplace put us in a similarly ticklish position as practicing Jews.

I'm not sure this sort of thing rises to the level of a constitutional complaint, but maybe we'd all get along better if the majority did not pretend that everyone can comfortably celebrate Christmas. The other day, as we were preparing for the first night of Chanukah, we had a visitor who remarked that she had always thought of Christmas as a secular holiday. My wife, a rabbi, explained to her why that view is problematic. Upon leaving, our visitor wished me a happy Chanukah and a merry Christmas.