Re-Examination of U.S. Holiday Traditions Is Urged

The rapidly dwindling fossil fuel supplies and growing concerns about the Global Warming Effect environmental crisis have prompted me to wonder whether Holiday-Season lights displays in front of private residences should be discouraged.

Those Holiday-Season lights displays are consuming lots of electricity and costing homeowners lots of money during a period in which most private citizens throughout this nation are financially strapped because of the incipient economic depression in the United States.

It also seems to me that the traditional American New Year Celebration fireworks displays, which involve the manufacture of what are undeniably frivolous items, are very wasteful of natural resources and energy.

The future of American society should rightfully be one in which an environmentally-protective Progressive Puritanism will reign in this country. That neo-Puritanical tradition of the 21st Century will reflect the greatest qualities of the Puritan leadership in New England several centuries ago.

As for those who say that Christmas lights in front of one's residence help to cheer up one's children during the Holiday Season, I would like to offer a polite response.

Parents could find other, energy-saving, means of delighting and entertaining their children during the Holiday Season. Parents could make a point of accompanying their children to wholesome live-theater stage productions, for instance.

Those wholesome live-theater performances, featuring clean language throughout, could help to instill in children a sense of the pageantry and sparkle of the Holiday Season without exacerbating our nation's and world's energy crisis and environmental crisis.