Public Outrage Prompts Mall to Reinstate Christmas Tree in Santa Display
By Robert G. Yetman, Jr. Editor At Large
A Charlotte, North Carolina mall has decided to change course in the face of a public backlash over its decision to remove the Christmas tree from its annual Santa display. SouthPark Mall had previously announced that this year���s mall Santa would be sitting under a model of a giant glacier, and not in the shadow of the traditional tree.
According to the mall, their reasoning behind the change was to be ���fresh and exciting,��� but the community was clearly having none of it. After getting pounded on social media, and finding itself on the receiving end of a Change.org petition that had 23,000 signatures by Sunday morning, the mall tweeted out the following message: ���We're adding key elements to the Santa set this week & listening to our customer feedback, we will now include a traditional Christmas tree.��� Given the direction of the social narrative these days, it seems revealing that the mall tweet included the adjective ���traditional��� when referring to the Christmas tree. Although the precise origins of the Christmas tree remain somewhat unclear, Christians the world over have long embraced the tree as an expression of the holiday season, often topping it with an angel or star to represent either the archangel Gabriel or the Star of Bethlehem.
