O Christmas Tree, O Depressing Christmas Tree

Expect this study to justify the banning of lots of Christmas decorations next year:

Here's a new twist to the annual "War on Christmas" debate: Reminders of Christmas can make religious minorities feel ill at ease - even if they don't realize it.

When people who did not celebrate Christmas or who did not identify as Christian filled out surveys about their moods while in the same room as a small Christmas tree, they reported less self-assurance and fewer positive feelings than if they hadn't been reminded of the holiday, according to a new study.

The university students didn't know the study was about Christmas, said study researcher Michael Schmitt, a social psychologist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada.

Nonetheless, he said, the presence of the tree caused non-celebrators and non-Christians to feel subtly excluded.

"Simply having this 12-inch Christmas tree in the room with them made them feel less included in the university as a whole, which to me is a pretty powerful effect from one 12-inch Christmas tree in one psychology lab," Schmitt told LiveScience.

Are they depressed because they feel excluded, or are they depressed because they've chosen to exclude themselves and this is some type of guilt reaction?  Hard to say, but I expect that this study will become the basis for many a Christmas complaint in 2011.