The latest commercial product everyone is putting on their Christmas list this year is brightly wrapped, pre-packaged controversy. I don’t even think people really care about some of the issues they complain about any more; they just want some attention. With that in mind, I’ll take a bite at the Christmas tree on central campus, the Christmas music in food service, why a very small number of people object them and why they shouldn’t.

I certainly believe in keeping the state out of the business of religion. I am not a Christian. I can count the number of times I’ve been inside a church for services on one hand, and the credit for every one of my trips goes to somebody who was trying to convert my heathen soul (or lack thereof). My parents are the same way. We have no denomination to point to as the one we are ignoring. No drop of holy water has ever touched our heads at any age.

But I can tell you that not one year has passed in which my family has not had Christmas. This isn’t some kind of irony; there is no hypocrisy here. Christmas has become so secular that the only time Christ is represented is in the name.

It’s like bagels. They may well be one of the greatest contributions to secular baked goods ever, but I don’t take offense that they are served in food service because they are the product of a culture and tradition not my own. If the Department of Residence decided to upgrade and serve only kosher bagels, I would revel in it because even though I am not Jewish I can enjoy the traditions of that culture.

Should we take the bagels out of the dining halls, too? Or is that different because it’s just a food item and doesn’t embody the trappings of Judaism the way “Jingle Bells” represents Christmas — six of one, half dozen of the other?

As a guy who has always been on the outside of his own white, Christian state, learning to adapt has always been the best option. Do I feel put out? Occasionally, but not because of traditions that are inclusive.

There is no need to make peace on earth, brotherly love and joy to the world the sole domain of Christians. Christians don’t demand it. No one is forced to convert.

Christmas was always more about Santa Claus, presents and feasting than about Jesus in my house. Christian or not, many households treat it that way.

I fully support the separation of church and state, but I want to pull a gangland style beatdown on people who like to claim it is hypocritical for a state institution to decorate trees.

No one around here is being hypocritical. They accommodate as many as they can all year long and just want to keep one of the best parts of their own culture at Christmas, and I have to respect them for that.

You see, the thing about diversity is that there are all kinds of different people in the world. There are Chinese and Europeans. There are Africans and Indians (two kinds). There are Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Christians and atheists. When you travel around the world, you find all these people and in widely varying numbers. Some places, like China, are populated with nothing but Chinese people, while you might be hard-pressed to find Chinese people in Africa.

The world is filled with many different kinds of people. But when you insist on making every place equally diverse, you don’t end up with more diversity, you just end up with a melange of people. Diversity is the texture of life.

It’s like making a smoothie. Throw in a smidgen of white people, a few Asians, a dash of African and a handful of everything else and mix it up lightly, leaving a few chunks so people enjoying it can say, “Hmmm, you can really taste the whitey, and the Asian makes a nice accent.” But sometimes you just want Mexican, you know?

Whether we like it or not, Iowa at this point in time is a very white, very Christian kind of place. That is changing rapidly, and we should no more lament that fact than we should hurry to make it happen. We should no more abandon our traditional holiday rituals than the Chinese should accommodate us when we go to school there.

It should make non-Christians happy enough that Iowa State guts our traditions by downplaying their origins calling that big Christmas tree a holiday tree just to be sensitive to their needs.

I say strip the BS completely. Call it a Christmas tree. Why should we feel guilty because large numbers of Jewish people don’t live here? Why should we feel guilty because this state was settled by Germans, Norwegians and Dutch?

I don’t entirely understand why white people insist on feeling guilty about exercising their cultural muscles once in a while, but I do believe that any group of people forced or even just encouraged to subvert their own way of life grow to eventually resent it. After years of being force fed political correctness, many in the mainstream are ready to say, “Screw it, I want an old-fashioned Christmas, and that means not apologizing for a tree.”