A year ago, my town was locked in the kind of seasonal fight that you usually don’t witness until Uncle Willie starts drinking eggnog from the ladle and tells Aunt Winifred what he really thinks of her Donner-and-Blitzen earrings.
It was Scrooge—the South Orange–Maplewood Board of Education—vs. Tiny Tim—the kids in the school choir and brass ensemble. The stakes: enforcement of a years-old ban on school-sanctioned performances of Christmas music. At first, I was merely bewildered. Then I wanted the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come to open a can of whup-ass on all the holiday haters. The ban struck me as the kind of political correctitude embraced by folks who champion the First Amendment but exchange high-fives when one of them steals a Bush/Cheney placard from a neighbor’s lawn. The anti-carol crusaders were marching in Grinchstep. Did crooning “Good King Wenceslas” really constitute a hate crime?
I cherish my warm, fuzzy elementary-school memories of standing up—classroom by classroom—to sing carols for parents, but I began to wonder how fondly old classmates Andrew Rosenblum and Leslie Katz recall those performances. Many of my non-Christmas–celebrating friends say that they don’t mind carols one bit. Forbidding a secular institution from leading or hosting a religious observance is just common sense. But the wide-eyed “Maplewood is neutering—no, killing—Christmas” crowd shouted down the legal debate. Meanwhile, the board went off the deep end too, forbidding even instrumental perfomances, presumably since its lyrics were so well known as to create a wordless oppression of the nonreligious. No hum, all ye faithful…
But surely, I thought, a school concert could include music by Handel just as a student art exhibit could include studies of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Religion is intertwined with the DNA of our cultural history. After all, we still perform The Merchant of Venice even though some deem it anti-Semitic.
More to the point—and notwithstanding its pretzel logic—I believe that the board made the right legal choice: no official carol celebration for either a school audience or for the downtown tree-lighting ceremony. Then guess what happened? A bunch of kids in the ensemble secured a permit to spend a blustery afternoon serenading folks in downtown Maplewood; their teacher played, but did not lead. People in the spirit could revel in the sounds, while the uninterested could stay home.
Presidential politics aside, the Christian calendar no longer adequately represents our blended society. Still, I’d like all of us to avoid playing any more of this religious Texas Hold ’Em… I will see your Ramadan and raise you Kwanzaa… Does Yom Kippur beat Christmas? We overanalyze and hyper-rationalize. We claim to honor all religions and cultures, but our secular institutions teach our kids almost nothing about them.
The real Christmas killer here is the yuletide hype that begins before kids take off their Halloween costumes. We trade true expressions of faith for harried shopping trips and retail sales figures. Prince Hal said to Falstaff more than 400 years ago, “If all the year were playing holidays, to sport would be as tedious as to work.” Here in Christmas present, the board did move toward sanity this fall, decreeing that the music department could hold public performances of Christmas music—even during the month of December—as long as the material was consistent with the broader curriculum. I can only hope that folks will take that for the civil peace treaty that it is. Studying the history, traditions, and celebrations of religions is a far cry from staging the Stations of the Cross in the school auditorium. And hearing songs of all faiths can bring enlightenment. Believing otherwise is medieval.
Dirk Olin is executive director of the Institute for Judicial Studies.
Article from December, 2005 Issue.