“THE CHRISTMAS TREE IS CENTRAL to the celebration of Christmas,” said Eugene, Oregon, City Manager Jim Johnson, “and therefore symbolic of a Christian holiday.”

Some were unsurprised. Eugene, a university town of 130,000, roughly halfway between Portland and the California border, is a hotbed of radicalism. It is home to many of the Leftist activists who were blamed for disrupting the recent World Trade Organization gathering in Seattle. And Oregon was the state where environmentalists have come closest to making lumbermen extinct in order to protect the “endangered” Northern Spotted Owl (which is essentially indistinguishable from the plentiful Mexican Spotted Owl).

But, even in Eugene, most citizens have been outraged by one man’s ban on this widely loved decoration. This ban was “not in the best interest of the community,” says Mayor Jim Torrey, who, short of firing him, lacks the legal power to override his City Manager’s directive. A local firefighters’ union threatened to file legal action, and Johnson granted them an exemption, but only to have trees up on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Local opposition has kept talk radio telephone lines melting and Letter to the Editor pages full.

He banished Christmas trees, says Johnson, because they “are not religion-neutral.” Their presence in government facilities potentially offends non-Christians by suggesting that Christianity is the state’s dominant or even officially-sanctioned religion.

His critics reply that Johnson’s employer, the government, recognizes Christmas as a legal holiday. (A lawsuit in federal court in Ohio, filed as a private citizen by city attorney Richard Ganulin, aims to end the “sectarian celebration” of Christmas as a national legal holiday.) Eugene Christmas-tree huggers also would remind Johnson that the White House itself lights a national Christmas tree.

“Mr. Johnson’s quest for cultural diversity has led him to commit the most fundamental liberal error,” writes Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel. “To him, the path to tolerance and diversity lies not in attempting to understand each other better, but in eradicating or ignoring our differences. Rather than allow the city to celebrate all holidays joyfully and openly - putting up Christmas trees, menorahs, Kwanzaa kinaras or other symbols - Mr. Johnson has instead decided to outlaw them all.”

Mr. Johnson’s shortcoming is that he believes these trees are quintessential Christian symbols. Look closer and you will discover that Christians have a reason for cutting off the roots of that tree in their living rooms. The roots of the Christmas tree originate in times, places, and symbolic meanings that long predate the birth of Jesus.

Consider this passage from the Prophet Jeremiah (10:2-4) speaking six centuries before Jesus: “Thus saith the Lord, Learn not the way of the heathen…. For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman with the axe. They deck it with silver and gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not.”

No such use of a decorated tree is to be found in the New Testament in association with Jesus. But, as you see above, the Prophet Jeremiah seems to be telling us that cutting down and mounting a tree and then decorating it with silver and gold is idolatrous, “the way of the heathen” that the Lord tells his people not to learn. One such symbolic use of a tree is linked to the cult of the Egyptian pagan goddess Isis.

The apparent origin of our “Christmas tree” comes from the pagan Roman cult of Saturn, their god of sowing or seed. Priests of Saturn were initiated in a gruesome ceremony that involved dancing around a decorated tree. The merriest festival of the ancient Roman year was Saturnalia, celebrated for seven days from December 17 to 24. During this festival, all work ceased, slaves were granted a week of free speech and other liberties, and some moral rules were relaxed for everybody. A major part of Saturnalia was that people gave each other gifts.

This festival also corresponded with the winter solstice around December 21, after which the Sun begins to move north again towards summer and days start to get longer. In the far-spread cult of Mithras, which originated in the Middle East, December 25 marked the celebration of Sol Invictus, the victorious Sun.

So was Jesus actually born on December 25, ask scholars, or did the early Christian church decide to celebrate Christmas on this date to expropriate the most popular of Mediterranean pagan celebrations? Was picking this date the calendrical counterpart of Christians deliberately building their churches on the exact sites where Aztec temples had stood?

If the Gospel is right in saying that shepherds were watching their flocks by night near Bethlehem when Jesus was born, then the Prince of Peace likely was born no later in the year than early October - the season when, for thousands of years, shepherds in that region have moved their sheep from nighttime fields to safer enclosures.

The Pilgrims in New England had no major celebration of Christmas, viewing it as a holiday contaminated with pagan symbols such as Christmas trees and yule logs and wanton licentiousness and merrymaking.

This year, in Lexington, Massachusetts, Puritan descendants were offended when a federal judge upheld a new town ordinance banning unattended creches or any other religion’s symbols from the town’s historic Battle Green. Town selectmen acted after receiving permit requests for other religious displays, including the Egyptian Sun God Ra, cows to honor Hinduism, and a statue of the late comedian Flip Wilson. Required to treat all faiths alike, the selectmen chose to banish all, much as the Eugene City Manager did. But the original Puritans would likely have approved the banning of such ostentatious Christmas display.

Liberals are fond of quoting Thomas Jefferson’s private letter referring to maintaining a wall of separation between Church and State. This would be satisfactory if such Leftists embraced the whole of Jefferson’s philosophy and not this one tidbit they love to take out of context. Jefferson wanted Church and State separate, but he also wanted the State to remain very, very, very small and confined to a tiny distant corner of the public square.

Today’s Leftists operate from a different syllogism: they want separation of Church and State, the State to control everything and be everywhere, and therefore the Church to be driven out of the public square completely and reduced to nothing. Their view, Leftists need to be reminded, is not what Jefferson advocated.

Christmas trees, writes Strassel, only became popular in the 19th Century after Prince Albert and Queen Victoria encouraged people to decorate trees. Jews living in predominantly-Christian Europe and America elevated the status of a festival so minor in the Jewish calendar that until recently it went almost unnoticed in Israel - Hanukkah - and celebrated it with gift-giving and decorated “Hanukkah bushes” that bore a striking resemblance to Christmas trees.

Perhaps that could resolve differences in Eugene, Oregon. If people of every religion, as well as atheists, agnostics, Latter Day Druids, and Mother Earth worshippers, could find some reason to decorate a tree and give gifts at this time of year, this pre-Christian symbology would become universal. Embraced by all, the “Christmas” tree would offend none.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good New Year.