i am obviously not studying

The part of the yahoo homepage which bears the big "Yahoo!" banner tends to wind up decorated at each holiday with some little festive something. Sometimes just fall leaves. Sometimes spring flower buds. For halloween it was a skeleton that, if you placed the mouse over the banner, would jump up and dance like Michael Jackson from Thriller. It was kinda cool.

For x-mas, however, I see the yahoo banner is decorated with some snowflakes and a dancing ginger bread man who causes colorful baubles to appear and hang from the letters of "yahoo" like x-mas tree decorations. A ginger bread man? This is the symbol of x-mas?

So, right, of course, yahoo is feeling constrained to decorate for the "holidays" w/o actually naming any *particular* holiday so as to avoiding alienating anybody who doesn't necessarily favor that particular holiday. To that end, we are celebrating ginger bread man and snowflake day! Yay! Just like when I was a kid!

This is ridiculous. Can't we all just agree once and for all that x-mas (the version with santa and a tree) is a *secular* holiday all about drinking egg nog and kissing under mistletoe and, what was that other thing?, oh yeah, right, and getting lots of presents. Can't we let yahoo put a big tree up with santa running around it? Does anybody really feel that the image of a red-suited guy holding a bag of presents and standing in front of a decorated tree is in any way *religious*? The tree's roots are pagan and god only knows where santa came from, but he wasn't in the manger, I know that much. So why the fuss?

Just seems simpler my way.