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Letter to the editor

Off/beat

Singers serve up winter pablum

By JIM THORNER
Published December 12, 2004

Getting any winter presents this year? Didn't think so. I'm not either.

But after sitting through a school winter concert last week, you'd imagine the mere arrival of cold weather warranted a burst of merrymaking, feasting and gift giving.

You know, the activities our grandparents once attached to the Holiday Formerly Known as Christmas.

You see, Christmas is verboten in the public schools. I'm not sure how it happened, but I have my suspicions.

Some cultural commissars in our oh-so-enlightened teachers colleges got it into their heads that Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer would set off conniption fits among couples with Darwin magnets affixed to their cars.

Ever fearful of mixing church and state, principals and teachers, come December concert season, feel compelled to whip up a holiday froth of nothingness.

They imagine the incantation of the word "Christmas" will sear the ears of non-Christmas-celebrating kids, like The Exorcist's holy water splashed on a pea-soup-regurgitating Linda Blair.

The result is a string of bland ditties like those at last week's school concert. The theme was "Winter in America." My son had to wear a scarf to portray kids up North shivering through another December, even though it was 70 degrees outside.

The politically correct songs were about snow days, grandma's chicken soup and slippers kids will get as presents "this winter." They even did a piece about Florida hurricane relief. All cute. All well performed. All mostly beside the point.

It's not as if parents are clamoring for religious reinforcement from the elementary school chorus, or sermons hidden in every song.

My gripe is that Christmas - a federal holiday, mind you - wasn't mentioned once. It has become the holiday that dare not speak its name.

I'm not surprised traditional carols are dog meat. Silent Night isn't nonsectarian enough to make the grade in our secularized schools. But what's with the purge of Rudolph? Let me guess: That line Then one foggy Christmas Eve ...

To the school's credit, it offered one Christmas song. Its origins were well disguised, though. It was titled Noel. That's French for Christmas.

And the school ensured it was only an instrumental version of the carol, lest such lines as Born is the king of Israel offend our sensibilities.

My wife had a good point. She was born behind the Iron Curtain. She said that in the old Soviet Union, the Communist government emphasized Grandfather Frost as a substitute for the Christianity the Soviet state wanted to suppress. Take pride, America: We're now emulating Nikita Khrushchev.

My beef isn't with individual teachers or principals, most of whom I admire. It's just a pity the educational establishment views the holidays as a minefield around which it has to tiptoe.

Don't believe it? I called my son's school and asked to speak about the "Christmas concert." The secretary quickly corrected me.

"Winter concert. Wouldn't want to use the wrong words," she said as if she didn't buy the whole let's-downgrade-Christmas thing herself but was just doing her job.

I compare concert organizers to chefs planning a holiday meal but botching it through oversensitivity: "Please, no salt. Remember the heart patients. And hold the sugar, just in case there's a diabetic at the table. And lay off the spice. Wouldn't want to upset the grandpas' cantankerous stomachs."

What you're left with is a thin, bland gruel. The show didn't honor Christmas. It didn't honor "the holidays." And it didn't even honor winter that well, at least the sweaty winters we get here in Florida.

After the performance ended, the couple next to us offered us a hushed "Merry Christmas" as an antidote to the previous 40 minutes of blandness. We reciprocated, feeling like secret agents in enemy territory exchanging passwords.

On the drive home we passed dozens of houses wrapped in Christmas lights like so many Snoopy dog houses. It was all so commercial, so gaudy.

But to paraphrase Charles Dickens, referring to Ebenezer Scrooge, the famous miser turned yuletide lover: They know how to keep Christmas well.

May the schools suffer a similar transformation.

[Last modified December 12, 2004, 00:32:19]