Thank goodness for the infusion of new blood this school gets every year, so such cogent observations can continually be made that the veterans apparently become blinded toward. Rather than setting out to disabuse new students of their common sense, we should stop and ask, "WHY is this complaint being made every year? What are we failing to understand on this campus?" There's surely a lot of room to rethink things. It may be the ones who disregard the "same, silly complaints" who form the biggest roadblocks to solving the complaints.

Is it not going a little too far to greet students waking up from a night of trick-or-treating with boxes and pre-assembled Christmas trees, not to mention declining to decorate in any way whatsoever for Thanksgiving? Do we actually need Christmas, a celebration of the holy morning, to start the day after Thanksgiving (well, at BYU, the day after Halloween) and last a whole month (or 2)? Are we really helping either holiday when we ignore the first and go overboard with the second? Is Christmas really about undertaking such a gigantic decorating burden that it has to be started months in advance? Is it impossible to better phase the decorating, so that longer tasks like light-stringing could innocuously be done early, with the quicker, more visible jobs waiting till much later? What are the decorations for if not to gratify the campus patrons, many of whom, year after year, are chagrined by the non-recognition of Thanksgiving?

Christmas has become very meaningful in our society despite its roots. I wonder what further meaning we're missing out on by pushing Thanksgiving, a holiday so intertwined with our religion, into a corner.

Thank you for your comments. I assure you that I was not trying to put down anyone with my letter. I apologize for the implication that I intended any such thing.

I will point out that the title I had intended for the letter was not used. This letter was meant as a simple expression of a thought, nothing more. I feel the substituted title puts a more confrontational tone to the letter as a whole, and I ask that the Daily Universe use the titles submitted with letters, rather than inserting their own.

Let me guess, Suzanne -- this is the first year you've been on the BYU campus in November. How do I know? Because this same, silly complaint arises EVERY YEAR. You're not the first one to bring it up. I personally don't put up Christmas decorations until after Thanksgiving, either, but I do have two things for you to think about. First of all, as people who put up the decorations will tell you every year, it's a LOT of work to get all of the wonderful decorations up all over campus. How worthwhile would it seem if the decorations were only up for 2 weeks of class?! Nobody would get to enjoy all that hard work for very long.
Secondly, we aren't skipping Thanksgiving. We have a lot to be grateful for, and one of those things is the birth of our Savior, Jesus Christ. Christmas commemorates that. We shouldn't forget to show thanks for one of the greatest gifts we've ever received. It doesn't have to be December for us to do that.

While I completely agree with you that people need to focus on thanksgiving, we can't blame BYU decorating. This conversation is held every year in the daily universe and from what I can tell, it takes too long to set up ALL the decorations for them to jump into action once thanksgiving is done. They wouldn't be done decorating until a day or two before Christmas, and we wouldn't have the beauty of the decorations leading up to Christmas. Form what I have seen it looks like they try and put up the decorations that don't catch you eye as much first, like the lights wrapped around trees, so they are trying.