SHOCKED AND DISMAYED

To the Editors of The Crimson:

I was shocked and dismayed at the blatantly commercial tone of your holiday supplement. The focus on expensive gifts, expensive ski vacations, and expensive resorts was not only vulgar but also out of keeping with your usually astute social perspectives. I was quite disappointed to see the bylines of some of your better writers attached to such "sell-out" articles.

Certainly these are hard times for everyone and perhaps your newspaper desperately needs the extra revenue an advertising supplement can bring in. But I expected a newspaper like yours--one with intelligent writers and an unusually well-informed radical viewpoint--to come up with something more provocative. Not only don't you attack the sickening commercial aspects of Christmas, you exploit them.

My husband (Harvard '70) and I have been arguing for years over whose university boasted a better newspaper. This morning, when we happened across a copy of your holiday supplement, he acceded the question. Sally Tobias