Remove VLC's Red December Hat

[ryo]

For those who look forward to the VLC Santa/Christmas hat it is a fun easter egg, after years of bug reports/requests the VLC team has added an easy way to turn it off when in the past they suggested choosing another video player if the hat was a problem.  I studied and worked in the US for a while and to me that red Santa hat in VLC and other mentions of Christmas are either advertisement to buy-buy-buy from October through December or a reminder of the sometimes loud and angry opposing cultural-religious arguments that always descended into their strict binary politics, so I prefer VLC's mention of Christmas disabled like I block other advertisements and distractions.
I suppose it differs on what Christmas means to an individual.

As an irreligious, apolitical, unschooled, non-western anarchist, I just go like "meh whatever" to such things, I never really understood why some people make such a huge deal out of non-issues anyway.
Black Friday and Christmas are both extremely commercial "buy-buy-buy" events over here, so nothing spiritual about it on this side of the world.
But never felt the need to buy like a crazy by simply ignoring the "CONSUME!" "OBEY!" "THEY LIVE!" type of messaging.

As for cultural-religious arguments, this is all part of the divide-and-conquer scheme the masses worldwide have been conditioned into after many years of government indoctrination I mean education.
Humans were never born hating one other, it's all part of conditioning the population.

But well, each individual has a different opinion towards pretty much everything, so in this sense I can see how this should be an option rather than forced upon you.

I also don't like unexpected and non-functional changes, even small ones, to my UI; I expect that a tab with an orange cone is VLC, I recognize the icon a little slower in the several weeks a year with red in a tab's VLC icon, a few weeks later I am slightly distracted when the icon returns to normal. 

tldr, VLC is the best video player but I am slightly distracted every year by the Santa hat so upthread is how to disable it.

I agree on this part, automatically changing stuff should not be a feature in the first place.
I even made a point a few days ago about if you someone else decides when you install updates or updates get installed automatically, then it means it's not your device.
Same thing applies to functionality in software; if someone else controls features remotely without your knowledge or consent, then it's not your software.
If functionality which allows someone else to remotely change an icon for you even exists, imagine what else might be possible, like remotely implementing malware, telemetry etc without your knowledge or consent.