Thursday, December 01, 2005

'Christmas' Tree Wars


Rockefeller.....................National....................Capitol

OK I think this is stupid but sort of funny. WaPo reports there's a little war that goes on regarding the 3 Big Trees.

According to the calendar of official Washington, the holiday season kicks off tonight, when the president and first lady flip the switch to light thousands of bulbs on the Colorado blue spruce on the Ellipse, the one the White House declares the nation's official Christmas tree.
Except New York flipped the switch last night for the tree at Rockefeller Plaza. It was, said some steeped in the tree wars, a careful, calculated decision to preempt the president.
Pre-Emptive lighting!!! They don't like that in Washington...
"I don't think they should do that. New York tries to kind of outshine us, and it is a little bit irritating," said David Curfman, the official historian for the White House tree
This is all sounding very gay to me and there's an Official tree historian????? WTF
But then there is also a third tree in the fray, the Congress' Capitol tree. The Capitol tree is the "people tree" with homemade decorations by students and artists from all over the country. That is opposed to the National tree which is elaborately decorated by General Electric. As a former Capitol landscaper puts it......"The feeling, the emotion that goes into the Capitol tree is something really special. That other tree, some decorator does that tree; there's nothing personal about it. It looks like it could be in any shopping mall."

The White House is supposed to light the National tree first but the lighting of the 2 DC trees gets partisan. Said the former Capitol landscaper....."Every year, I'd wait to see when the White House was doing theirs. Then I'd schedule ours the day before," he said. But things are different now."

They certainly are.
I have no problem with each party fighting to light their tree first. It's one of those little fights each year that is quite funny. But Sweet Jeebus I have a limit.....
Denny Hastert got the Capitol tree renamed from "Capitol Holiday Tree" to "Capitol Christmas Tree." Now I want a nice little limited tree war something akin to Grenada or Panama. Hastert's pandering threatens an escalation of hostilities to something more like another Iraq. So I must to say, if for no other reason than to get on O'Reilly's List, Enough With the Christmas Tree War Bullshit!

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