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GREEN, GREEN, GO AWAY
All evergreens in the state of Washington will be painted brown by the end of next week in order to comply with the newly enacted Xmas Bill, which mandates that all public year-end celebrations must be non-sectarian. This will go a long way toward correcting the overly religious celebrations that have become all too common this time of year, according to Thaddeus Leaflink, President and co-founder of Leave the X in Xmas, the organization that spearheaded lobbying efforts to get the bill passed. Getting rid of Santa Claus, candy canes and ornaments on trees was only the beginning, he said in a live interview on local public access radio station KORN this morning. We still have people going around wishing one another Merry Christmas, giving each other gifts, and festooning everything in sight with colored lights, Leaflink said. These actions must be stopped or severely curtailed. And they will be as soon as Leave X can make enough legislators see the light. Until then, we’re happy with cutting back on the appalling overuse of red and green that is so common this time of year. The state will be sending out hundreds of work crews in the next few days to spray all publicly owned evergreens with PC Brown, a water-resistant chemical that will dye the trees a light brown color. According to Leaflink Chemicals, the manufacturer of PC Brown, it will take better than five inches of rain -- about two weeks worth this time of year -- to wash the chemical off of the foliage. Then it will return to its natural green color, hopefully just in time for the new year. The color change would have been accomplished weeks ago if lawmakers hadn’t spent valuable time wrangling over the Stoplight Clause, which was part of the original bill. That clause would have required that the colors red and green also be removed from all traffic signals and signs between December 15 and January 1, but there were endless arguments about what colors should replace the traditional ones, how to educate the public about the new colors, and how to keep traffic accidents to a minimum during the period. The clause was eventually removed when it became obvious that it would be impossible to reach any kind of agreement before the holidays were over. Leave X has promised to reintroduce the bill at the beginning of the next session. The Leave the X in Xmas group also wanted to ban department store sales in the month of December to discourage year-end gift giving. However, they shelved that idea when the Coalition of Concerned Citizens and Merchants threatened to burn the organization’s headquarters to the ground and run all of the Leave X corporate officers out of the state. But that is only a temporary setback. In a prepared statement Leaflink said, "We intend to stay the course until black and white Stop signs and monochrome traffic signals are the law of the land." |