For a country founded on religious freedom, we still have learning to do.

Promise a third-grader hot chocolate and donuts, and they’re sure to get excited. At least that’s how it worked for Michele Lyons’ son, a student at Carmel River Elementary School, who came home and announced the sweets in connection to a planned tree-lighting event: “Mommy, we have to decorate the Christmas tree,” Lyons says he told her. “We can decorate it with a menorah.”

While Lyons is an atheist, she is culturally Jewish, and celebrates Hanukkah. The instructions in connection to the tree-lighting explicitly encouraged people of other faiths to contribute. “We encourage students and their families to decorate the tree with an item that reflects their families’ values, heritage and/or faith. Please ensure, due to capacity limitations, that the item can fit inside a lunch paper bag,” per a flyer from the PTA.

Yes, there are Jewish-themed Christmas ornaments out there in our melting pot world, but Lyons wasn’t having it. “The suggestion is offensive to a Jewish person,” she says. “You are asking us to endorse a Christmas symbol.”

This is where things get murky. While I think it’s unambiguous that a Christmas tree is a Christmas symbol, the U.S. Supreme Court disagrees. “Although Christmas trees once carried religious connotations, today they typify the secular celebration of Christmas,” the court has ruled.

Same goes for Santa, elves, reindeer pulling a sleigh, etc. While I get it – there are Christmas decorations everywhere, including in non-religious settings – the assumption underlying all of this is that Christianity is synonymous with American culture. At what point has a religion become so broadly practiced that its symbols are treated as secular? Judaism, at least according to the Supreme Court, has not arrived: “The Christmas tree, unlike the menorah, is not itself a religious symbol.”

When I asked Lyons about her family’s menorah options, I asked if she might have had a tiny one in compliance with the paper bag specifications, and I called it a ritual object. She bristled at my phrase “ritual object,” instead equating the menorah to a Christmas tree – so widely seen and displayed that it’s a secular decorative symbol, not an object of ritual. (As a practicing Jew myself, I use a menorah to light candles eight nights a year.)

Lyons proposed a corresponding menorah-lighting alongside the PTA’s tree-lighting, with a large, inflatable menorah (no candles, no fire hazard). She was denied, and so she filed a federal lawsuit against the River School and against Carmel Unified School District, seeking an order that would have blocked the Dec. 10 tree lighting from happening. She lost, in part on procedural grounds, and partly because of how darn confusing it is that religious objects are deemed secular.

The tree lighting went on, and Lyons’ child did not attend.

CUSD Superintendent Ted Knight says, “We certainly don’t want any student, any parent, and staff member not feeling a sense of belonging in their school – we want to create inclusive environments.”

This is not the first time a public institution locally has been embroiled in litigation on this topic. In 1990, a Jewish teenager in Monterey became a plaintiff in a lawsuit against the city opposing a nativity scene displayed outside of City Hall; he won.

Attorney Michelle Welsh represented 13-year-old Victor Ringel and today serves on the boards of Northern California’s and Monterey County’s chapters of the ACLU. She sees overt displays of Christianity on the rise across society: “It’s odd that Christianity is getting a lot more leeway, to have Christianity be sort of the favored religion,” Welch says. “That’s more alarming than just accommodating religion in general.”

Welsh is watching as courts rule in a range of cases involving religious freedoms, including on vaccine mandate exemptions. “I get distressed because I have worked so hard for equality and fairness for the last 45 years and I think: What is happening?” she says. “People see their personal freedom as paramount over the other person’s safety or freedom or rights. I think it’s an atmosphere of fear that someone is going to take this from me and give it to you, and that’s not the way freedom works.”

SARA RUBIN is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at sara@mcweekly.com or follow her at twitter.com/sarahayleyrubin