“It’s a tree that unites us, that brings us together,” the shorter blonde hostess of “Fox & Friends” declares. “It’s about the Christmas spirit. It is about the holiday season. It’s about Jesus. It’s about Hanukkah. It is about everything that we stand for as a country: freedom and being able to worship the way you want to worship. It makes me so mad.”
Historically, bringing a cut evergreen tree into homes dates back to Roman times, when people in Germanic tribes would decorate their homes with cut branches (likely to mitigate the odors collecting in a house during the winter). The tradition was brought to the US by Hessian soldiers working with occupying British redcoats, and gained wider popularity as Germans migrated to the US in the 19th Century. It’s not associated with Hanukkah at all, and it’s connections to Jesus are tenuous rewrites of history.
Earhardt seems to want to change a “Christmas tree” to a “holiday tree” by associating the evergreen with various religions, which is not a factually-based claim unless you take it in a strictly secular sense.