Obviously people may have different views about city and town governments displaying Christmas symbols. Still, the bottom line is that when dealing with city or town government, one has to be sure you’re dealing with government only, irrespective of personal beliefs or affiliations other than government of course. Here, irrespective may be sound irreverent, but that isn’t the idea behind it. From the individual’s point of view, it is to clearly mark the boundaries of the domain a government should be dealing with.
Good government on any level is capable to yield its own respect or reverence from the citizens it is supposed to deal with. If it does so by exerting respect only, it may indicate that the way of doing things may be a little heavy handed. Some reverence from all citizens should be enough for everybody, as it leaves room to act upon different situations in a different way. According to circumstances.
Similarly, the bottom line on the separation church and state has to be practiced with a of reverence to the citizen in kind. As long as Coke-machines or other recognisable brands keep being present in town halls and public buildings every day of the year, there’s little harm in having Christmas symbols in the same town hall or public building for a number of weeks. After all, these symbols serve no other purpose but to cheer up the Christmas Holyday season during the dark winter days.
The true meaning of these symbols may be lost by now. Most of them came from European traditions that have been held longer than the existence of the US as a nation, just to give an idea. And especially in the US, most of them were revived and found their yearly use for commercial reasons only. Making objections now only indicates the same disrespect to the way these symbols found their way into today’s profane society as the irreverence with which their original meaning was pirated in order to make money. Except for a few bigots in the nineteenth century and maybe some new bigots of today, no harm was done whatsoever. As long as these bigots keep away from government in any way or form, this will remain so.