We get fairly annoyed when someone assumes to wish us a “Merry Christmas”, so you’d think we’d love to hear that Christian students and their parents are having to fight back against “the growing campaign in America to remove any trace of Christmas from public life.” In Massachusetts, a small town mayor was forced to apologize for inviting people to a “Christmas party” instead of a general holiday gathering and a Kansas newspaper had to refer to a decorated arborial sacrifice as a “community tree.” In other words, it’s no longer politically correct to refer to December 25 as Jesus’ birthday party to avoid offending those of us who celebrate those other winter holidays like Chanukah, Kwanzaa and Solstice.
We appreciate the breathing room (really, nothing makes us more nauseous than some lady wearing blinky earrings going on about the baby Jesus,) but somehow it all smacks of social censorship in the worst way. Instead of removing all mention of the religious origins of all these holidays, wouldn’t educating children instead foster something like tolerance and understanding? The JPost ran this story about how a Chicago school is handling the “December Dilemma” by teaching a group of mixed-faith kids the truth about Christmas as well as Chanukah, which will have purists squirming in their seats. But if Jewish and other non-Christian parents so fear that any mention of Jesus will immediately brainwash their children into genuflecting, perhaps they’re not providing enough real information about their own religions.