HONOLULU, Hawaii (CNN) - I thought it was funny when The Washington Post joined various CNN anchors in teasing me about creating "something of a brand covering [President] Obama's vacations."

In a tongue-in-cheek piece, the Post's Perry Bacon wrote that I've been trading the "traditional news correspondent garb of a suit and tie for a seemingly endless variety of multi-colored Hawaiian shirts and flip-flops."

OK fine, you've got to be able to laugh at yourself. And what's wrong with injecting a little fun into live reports?

That's why I used to scoop up big belt buckles in Texas to cover then-President Bush's vacations in the sleepy town of Crawford. Now that a new president has brought us to a more exotic locale, the last thing I want to do is look like Richard Nixon and wear dress pants and wing-tip shoes to the beach.

But then I stopped laughing this morning when one of my colleagues at another network asked me in a semi-serious tone, "Did you see that editorial about you in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser?"

I thought he was joking until he handed over the offending newspaper editorial with the headline, "Reporting live, in my Hawaiian shirt."

The short, kind-of-whimsical editorial wondered aloud whether there's a downside to Obama having his annual holiday vacation on the Hawaiian island of Oahu in the tiny town of Kailua, about a 30-minute drive from the tourist-friendly Waikiki Beach that you see in our live shots.

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