Christmas is evolving into a pagan consumer festival to better appeal to a multi-cultural society and amid growing fears of litigation. The trend was highlighted in 2002 when the British Red Cross first implemented a policy to not display Christmas decorations in any of their 430 UK Charity Shops. The pace of change has been accelerating since. This year a report by the employment law firm Peninsula reveals that three out of four UK employers now ban festive decorations so as not to offend people of other faiths or because they fear litigation on the grounds of discrimination.

Health and Safety rules are also being blamed for the clampdown on yuletide tinsel with a spokesperson at Tower Hamlets local council defending their decision by maintaining "There's a concern people might hurt themselves trying to attach hanging decorations from the ceiling." The Royal Bank of Scotland has asked its staff to book an engineer if they want to hang cards on a string. Other employers are claiming the baubles and tinsel simply look unprofessional.

The Royal Mail seasonal stamps now exclude religious imagery and the majority of corporate cards you now receive are unlikely to contain the word Christmas or scenes of the nativity. Instead the cards are likely to wish you "Seasons Greetings" and feature winter scenes or a festive penguin. If the trend we see this year which has included refuse collectors in Kingston-upon-Hull being banned from wearing Santa hats, Wokingham District Council taking out an injunction against millionaire Vic Moszczynski for decorating the outside of his home, a college in Rotherham looking to replace traditional turkey lunch with halal chicken prepared according to Muslim beliefs, then I think we can predict that Christmas will have been replaced within twenty years by a pagan consumer festival and it's origins completely forgotten.

What is Christmas about anyway?

This morning I received a Christmas card which had already been opened. It wasn't sent this way, this had clearly happened since it entered the postal system.  Yet another experience to compound my lack of confidence in the Royal Mail to get it right, but it doesn't quite match an incident I had earlier in the year when I was sent a suit from a tailor in Hong Kong which never arrived.

The Royal Mail tracking system said it had been delivered to me, seemingly on a date when there was no one at home. They even had proof. They had a digital signature. This appeared to be someone's first name, but was so badly drawn I couldn't even make out the characters. It was as if one of the squirrels in the back garden had taken delivery and signed for it.

When I complained the Royal Mail suggested it must have been delivered to one of my neighbours. "If you were going to do that", I asked, "why would you not put a card through my door to tell me what you've done or ensure you get a full signature or record where you've delivered it if you've delivered it to a different address? Is there a policy, are you not meant to deliver to the address on the label?". 

It all seemed very suspicious, a fact reinforced when customer service told me the delivery person no longer worked with the Royal Mail. I was left to assume they were now roaming around in my suit, living a high life of sorts.

To my surprise, three months later, as I was getting out of my car, a neighbour, who lived about ten doors away and who I don't ever remember seeing before appeared with my Hong Kong parcel under his arm. "I've had this in my hall for a few months", he says.....

I recently heard the Cork City Council web site was being criticized for failing to really appreciate the needs of the people who might use it, in particular it didn't consider how the site might be displayed by other browsers. This seems to have culminated in the Council putting a note on the site saying it "will only operate correctly by using Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5. or greater". The user is then invited to "upgrade".

With close to 90% of browsers already using Internet Explorer 6 or above or using the superior Firefox browser the number of people this invitation would apply to is a very small minority, given that we must also count browsers such as Safari and Opera.

To change from Firefox to IE would actually be a downgrade. The W3C browser statistics for November '06, rate Firefox browser usage at just under 30%, as it continues to take market share away from Microsoft's Internet Explorer. The Council web site does not display properly in this browser, suggesting it was only developed on Internet Explorer and not tested on other environments.  By web standards, this is very un PC (boom boom), as it has the potential to alienate a substantial number of visitors..

W3C, shorthand for the World Wide Web Consortium, are the standards body for the web. They develop and define the language standards that ensure the universality of the web. In addition to Cork City Council ignoring users with other browsers, the website doesn't meet these standards set by the W3C. In fact, it contains twenty three errors, which realistically, would take about ten minutes to correct.

They do include an accessibility roadmap which does mention attaining AA and AAA accessibility standards. This is all very well, but it's usually better to start at the begining: Lads, aim for the A standard first, a good point to start at would be to correct the twenty three errors, and sort out displaying the site on other browsers. As a local government body you should be setting a standard. Upgrade.