IT’S DECEMBER and all across the US, Americans are excitedly engaged in the magical rituals that make this time of year so special.

Shopping malls are packed with special ideas for Holiday Gifts. Holiday Decorations sparkle and glitter from shop windows and rooftops. Offices and schools are hosting Holiday Parties. And in two halls and public squares around the country, people will be gathering for the traditional singing of Seasonal Songs around the traditional Holiday Tree.

About 90 per cent of Americans may be Christians; a born-again Christian who wears his faith very publicly may be in the White House; and the American entertainment industry may have given the world more Christmas schmaltz and pap than is good for it.

But for years it has been very definitely frowned on, and in some cases even illegal, to refer to this as the Christmas season.

The latest attempt at taking religion out of Christmas came this week when the Mayor of Boston’s office quietly informed the city’s population that the 48ft white spruce that traditionally sits on Boston Common at this time of year, and which they had always known as a Christmas Tree, was now a Holiday Tree.

A spokesman for the small Nova Scotia town that donated the tree to their neighbours was nonplussed by the renaming: “It was a Christmas Tree when it left here,” he said.

The desperate attempts to fit the awkward religious facts of Christmas into a religiously neutral, politically correct modern American public culture have been under way since at least 1989. That was the year the Supreme Court ruled that a display of a crèche (Nativity Scene) outside a Pennsylvania courthouse represented an official endorsement of religion and was therefore unconstitutional. Displays were lawful only if they included a range of symbols from different religious denominations.

This started out all right. But you can imagine the problems that made it unworkable. No sooner does some well-meaning town council put a menorah next to a crib outside the town hall than an aggrieved religious group comes along and demands its own totems and druidical symbols.

And the public space prohibition on religious manifestations has steadily seeped into the private sector. A growing number of retailers have decreed that their merchandise and signs must not carry any direct religious reference. Target, a large discount store chain, earned itself Scrooge status when it banned the Salvation Army from performing carols outside its stores.

Santa Claus has not been forbidden yet, but this is probably only because few people nowadays make any connection between the jolly redcoated man (now, in another gesture towards cultural neutrality, almost always accompanied by a Mrs Claus) and the 4th-century bishop and saint.

While the politically correct police have done their best to remove references to Christmas in television programming and other public forms of entertainment, they haven’t yet managed to rework traditional seasonal melodies so that Johnny Mathis sings “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like the Annual Midwinter Celebration of Giving”, or Bing Crosby gently dreams of a “White Holiday”. But with the digital technology available these days, it may not be long.

It is all another curious example of the complexity of a deeply religious country that is also deeply anxious to maintain the delicate balance between its many cultural and religious communities.

And yet there are signs that the politically correct straitjacket may be loosening. In response to the Boston demarche, this week Dennis Hastert, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, declared that the Holiday Tree in front of the Capitol would this year be called a Christmas Tree.

This week an organisation called Jews Against Anti-Christian Defamation, began a campaign entitled: “It’s OK to Say Merry Christmas”. Don Feder, the organisation’s president, said that for the vast majority of Jews, America’s largest non-Christian religious group, the idea of Christians celebrating Christmas was not in the least bit offensive. He bemoaned a “tyranny of the hypersensitive”.

It may be working. This year Christmas — in both word and image — has begun to seep back into common usage. Just this week, under threat of a Christian boycott, Wal-Mart, the nation’s biggest retailer, told its employees that they were not required to wish customers “Happy Holidays.”

They could, if they really wanted to, say “Merry Christmas”.

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