In Saginaw, Michigan this week, the annual Dickens Christmas Festival was re-named the Dickens Holiday Festival. The name change came because festival organizers face a dwindling advertising budget, and removing “Christmas” from the name allows them to advertise in public schools.
Downtown Development board member Kriss Roethleisberger told WNEM News that the new nomenclature does not mean that other Christmas-related aspects of the festival will be secularized. “The spirit of the event has not changed,” he said. “We have the live Nativity, the lighted Christmas parade, the community Christmas sing. It was simply that on one piece of marketing material we had the use the word ‘holiday.’”