Here’s the email I’ve just sent to The Times. Let’s hope it doesn’t turn out I’m hallucinating and saw 175 mentions of Christmas where in fact there were none.
I’m really confused.
In your story “Christmas lights switch-on ceremony renamed ‘Winter White Night” (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article6915007.ece) you report that, “Christmas will not be Christmas in Dundee this year. All references to the religious holiday have been dropped from the switching-on ceremony for the city’s festive lights.”
Yet when I go to look up information about the ceremony online, I find the program at http://www.dundee.com/winter-light-night.html where “Christmas” is mentioned no less than six times. “Christmas lights”, “Christmas fairy”, “Christmas shopping”, “Christmas carols”, “Christmas story telling” and “Christmas songs”.
There’s also the minor matter that “Christmas” gets no less than 50 mentions on the council’s web page listing events in November (http://www.dundeecity.gov.uk/events/month.php?monthyear=11,2009), followed by a further 119 in December (http://www.dundeecity.gov.uk/events/month.php?monthyear=12,2009).
That seems an awful lot of mentions of Christmas given your report that “Christmas will not be Christmas” and “All references … have been dropped”.
So as I said, I’m confused. Missing one obscure reference to Christmas I could understand. I’ve certainly made worse mistakes than that. But when the programme is littered with Christmas and the council’s website is too, what am I to make of your story?
Hat-tip: Liberal Conspiracy
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4 Comments
nice one Mark. I thought The Times had standards…
Yet another propagation of this total myth
Nice one debunking it this time Mark
@Sunny H: So did I, until I saw that the front-page story on the Sunday Times this week was [drumroll please...] the true identity of Belle de Jour! Clearly this is the most important thing to have happened in Britain! At least in this case she chose to go public, rather than being “outed” like Zoe Margolis and the police blogger were.
I get fed up with all these stories but you just know there will be several of them every year. It’s like the old Birmingham Winterval festival, which I gather was just a marketing name for all of the events the city was running around the Christmas period. No doubt next week it will be a moan about people calling it Xmas, (which admittedly I can’t stand either), but apparently it’s all to remove the word Christ from the name of it thanks to the PC-brigade or Europe or something, rather than just shorthand that people have used for decades.
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[...] festive light switch-on ceremony.” The main evidence this story isn’t true? See the 175 references to Christmas I counted up. (This story was also run by The Times, which hasn’t responded to my email nor [...]
[...] festive light switch-on ceremony.” The main evidence this story isn’t true? See the 175 references to Christmas I counted up, though Dundee Council’s response to the story was not as clear as it could have [...]