Auburn tree lighting ceremony gets a new name

The Plainsman reports:

After forming a committee and holding two open forums over an 11-month span, SGA announced this week that the new name of the former Holiday Tree Lighting will be “Holiday Celebration featuring the Lighting of the Christmas Tree.”

Wes Bonds, spokesman for the Holiday Tree Lighting/Holiday Celebration committee, said the committee got a lot of ideas from the two open forums.

“We wanted to find (a name) to encompass everything going on,” Bonds said.

The generic term “holiday” can include New Year’s Day, Diwali, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Hanukkah and Thanksgiving.

SGA President George Stegall said he believes the new name is more accurate. “There’s no holiday tree; it’s a Christmas tree,” Stegall said.

Stegall said the open forums helped the decision making process by allowing the committee to hear what the students and the Auburn community thought about the event.

“Something had to be done about calling a Christmas tree a holiday tree,” he said.

The debate about the event’s name began shortly before last year’s holiday tree lighting.

Former College Republicans President Laura Steele started a petition to rename the event, which had been called the Holiday Tree Lighting Ceremony since its inception in 2000.

Student leaders received 20,000 e-mails over the issue, according to the Associated Press.

This is certainly a welcome victory against the Auburn PC brigades, but the fact that it took 11 months to come up with such a common-sense solution is just the latest example of how political correctness isn't just mind-numbing...it's mind-dumbing.