Celebrate the Season?

In the local public school’s Holiday Concert that I recently accompanied on the piano, the kids sang songs from Winter, Hanukah, Christmas and Kwaanza traditions. In a local private “progressive” school, someone decided that all such songs were to be banned. The answer to the right-wing’s whining that their exclusive white Christian dominance of Winter Holidays was being cancelled was quite different in the two schools. The former responded with a more balanced inclusion, the other with a similar mindless exclusion. While I didn’t need to get personally involved, of course, this bothered me and I wrote this response that no one in the school will read, but we all might consider.

 

For all the flaws and exclusions and dubious histories and commercialization of Christmas as we've known it in America, it still can be a time when we pause and consider a little bit more kindness in this troubled world. There's a tangibly different feeling in the air, the city or town aglow with lights and amidst the buying frenzy, strangers (when not battling each other at Walmart) sometimes greet each other with a smile. Seasonal songs fill the airwaves and the chaos and confusion of the everyday world takes a turn toward clarity and compassion. We still can feel great pleasure in the special foods, the inspired gifts given or received, the moments to write to those we mostly don't think of during the year but remain part of our forever community. We unpack the menorah or kinara or Christmas tree decorations with some sweet remembrance of this special time we've experienced our whole life, remembering these past occasions with sweetness or sadness or laughter. It all becomes a marker in the relentless roll of the year and years. However temporary the respite from ill-will may be, still it makes a difference. We need it.

 

The stories of the diverse traditions (including the earlier Diwali) come to roost together in the confluence of cultures that make up the U.S.A.. They sing of light and hope and miracles, help us re-affirm ancient African or Middle Eastern or European pre-Christian values. Even if not attached to any organized religion, we still recognize the cozy way the darkening days can bring us deeper into ourselves and more connected with each other. Don’t we need to familiarize the children—all children— with these various expressions of hope and wonder so they understand that Christmas isn’t the only show in town?

 

And even in the overwhelming attention to the holiday of Christmas, such delicious diversity abounds. Some crown young people with Santa Lucia’s candles, some sing the Posada song at their neighbor’s door, some forego Silent Night for a rollicking Gospel version of Children Go Where I Send Thee. Ancient pre-Christian customs involving trees, mistletoe plants, Boar’s heads and a historical St. Nicholas transformed to an American mythological Santa Claus with Lappland reindeer take their place alongside the manger scenes. The European-derived hymns telling the Christmas story are mixed with the jazz-infused tunes singing of snowmen, a reindeer inspired by a Macy’s ad campaign and chestnuts roasting on an open fire, most written by Jewish songwriters like Irving Berlin, Mel Torme and Jules Stynes and made most memorable by black jazz musicians like Nat King Cole and Ella Fitzgerald. Diversity, anyone? Shouldn’t the children know about this? Be consciously exposed to it all?

 

Then there’s the great American heritage of Hollywood, showing us the miracles on 34^th Street, what Christmas in Connecticut looks like, how devotion to love and family and friendship overpowers capitalistic greed and reminds us that if we live rightly, it indeed is a Wonderful Life.  Shouldn’t we warn the children that an air rifle might “shoot their eye out” and it’s miserable to be a Bah Humbug miser who cares only for money? 

 

Might we put on plays with the kids that dramatize Isaac Singer’s both tender and crazily funny Jewish stories from Eastern Europe? The West African myth Sundiata that touches on the values later adopted for Kwaanza? The Hindu Ramayana story that helps lead to an understanding of Divali? The St. George and the Dragon play, complete with the sword dance, that echoes the ancient Solstice rituals of death and renewal? Might we tell the story of Buddha’s Enlightenment on December 8^th and read to the older kids some of Rumi’s poems on December 17^th in his Wedding night celebration when he leaves his earthly body to unite with the Divine Beloved? At the school where I worked for 45 years, we did all of this and more and instead of making children feel excluded and left out, it helped them understand how deeply connected we all actually are. And how delicious the differences are in the styles, both musically and culturally, amidst the commonalities.

 

All of this makes it just that much sadder when a school community mindlessly decides to dismiss the entire magic of December and refuses it all. Instead of all Holiday Songs and Stories, they choose none, closing the one tiny window in which our culture torn apart by divisiveness might agree on a cease-fire and find some common ground. Beyond the arguments of right and wrong lies this deep sadness that we're losing this chance to remind each other and the children that peace and love and happiness is possible, born on the wings of the beautiful and diverse songs and stories from both the old and new traditions.

 

When we dismiss that which can bring us together, even for what we think are the right reasons, what is left?