Talk about getting a grip. Methinks the Puritans and their modern day descendants would have "Santa" unmasked as an anagram and consigned to flames for putting the "merry" in Christmas!
Posted on 12/26/2005 8:11:14 AM PST by Conservatrix
To the Editor:
"Last week I substituted at a local elementary school in Lebanon County. The lesson plan required me to read the 1882 poem “The Night Before Christmas” by Clement Clarke Moore to two classes of students. While I can appreciate the poem for its literary value, the subject matter is offensive to me, and the reading of this poem to the children imposed values upon me which are against my deeply held religious beliefs. I could not in good conscience present the notion of Santa Claus as a truth to the children, and stated so.
No public school teacher should be required to teach a belief, or custom, or religion that he or she believes to be false, or be required to pass those purported falsehoods onto impressionable children, without the right to state a disclaimer. Furthermore, freedom of speech and religion, no matter how unpopular the speech or against cultural norms the religion, are protected rights under the Constitution of the United States. A secular public school should not be propagating any kind of religion. The belief in Santa Claus as a divine, magical, omniscient, powerful, giving, loving father-figure, to which children are taught to make supplications and requests, is a religion indeed-- a distorted substitute for the Judeo-Christian God; a false form of Christianity; a zealously-protected American idol.
In presenting the poem, I gave the children quick historical background about the Santa Claus myth-- its evolution from the historic Nickolaus, Bishop of Myrna in Asia Minor, who died in 343 A.D., to its amalgamation with ancient Western pagan traditions of German, Scandinavian and Dutch origins, to the current manifestation in the secular Christmas culture of today. (Dutch children, for example, would put their wooden shoes out at night for “Sante Klaus” to fill with candies.)
The current Santa Claus figure was popularized in the late 19th Century by artist Thomas Nast of Harper’s Weekly Magazine, who depicted “Saint Nick,” not as an elf, but a rotund, pipe-smoking man in a red and white suit. This is the deity to which countless public school children today are taught to make supplications, and about whom they sing their many songs at annual public school Christmas programs.
If people are upset about the revelation to children that Santa Claus is a myth-- which all children who are taught this lie find or figure out eventually-- perhaps it is because Santa is that zealously-guarded idol of their own modern religion. Therefore, as a religion, let Santa be kept out of the public school classroom (no more “Dear Santa” letters to line those school hallways)--or perhaps, in the interest of “diversity,” make his mythical, oversized personage share equal representation in literature, and song, and Christmas programs, with the other Person of the season: the Lord Jesus Christ, God made flesh, God with us."
What cold bubble have you been living in?
Knock it off....Howlin is neither nasty or creepy. Reading your vile posts, I doubt your neice even blinked an eye reading anything posted here. Not much can hold a candle to your ugliness.
(Even if I believed an 8 year old was reading FR on Christmas, which I don't.)
So then she's in favor of not teaching the fiction of evolution if the teacher believes it is false or against their religion?
Somehow I expect she'd just be a hypocrite instead.
May Christ deliver us from soulless Puritans.
Thanks for the laugh! I actually doubted you were a a parent until you wrote that!
So Captain Clueless introduces "fornication" into a discussion about Christmas customs, gets indignant about the fact that my 7 yr old doesn't know the word "fornication" yet, and completely blows off the context...than the idea his children should tell others that Santa is a lie made up to let kids go to bed early so parents can "fornicate"...
Speaking of "derogatory", do your enlightened, plain-spoken little kids think married couples "fornicate"? Do you understand the Biblical meaning of "fornication"? Do you think you "fornicate" with your marital partner after your kids go to sleep? I though atheists were above that old fashioned thing about "sex"....
Maybe 'tis you better dust off that King James Bible......
Back to my pipe.
If she cannot in good conscious read The Night Before Christmas and not shatter these childrens dreams, then she a) should not be teaching or b) be teaching college where it sounds more like she would fit in these days.
One big problem in society today is the rush to disavow fair tales and turn all children into young Einsteins before first grade.
Liberal plots notwithstanding, the Americans who succeeded in banning the holiday were the Puritans of 17th-century Massachusetts. Between 1659 and 1681, Christmas celebrations were outlawed in the colony, and the law declared that anyone caught "observing, by abstinence from labor, feasting or any other way any such days as Christmas day, shall pay for every such offense five shillings." Finding no biblical authority for celebrating Jesus' birth on Dec[ember] 25, the theocrats who ran Massachusetts regarded the holiday as a mere human invention, a remnant of a heathen past. They also disapproved of the rowdy celebrations that went along with it. "How few there are comparatively that spend those holidays … after an holy manner," the Rev[erend] Increase Mather lamented in 1687. "But they are consumed in Compotations, in Interludes, in playing at Cards, in Revellings, in excess of Wine, in Mad Mirth."Today's Puritans are no different from the Puritans of the "good old days": a bunch of frowny-faced fun-ruiners determined to suck every last drop of joy out of Christianity.After the English Restoration government reclaimed control of Massachusetts from the Puritans in the 1680s, one of the first acts of the newly appointed royal governor of the colony was to sponsor and attend Christmas religious services. Perhaps fearing a militant Puritan backlash, for the 1686 services he was flanked by redcoats. The Puritan disdain for the holiday endured: As late as 1869, public-school kids in Boston could be expelled for skipping class on Christmas Day.
The Puritans are the most cited example of anti-Christmas spirit, but not the only one. Quakers, too, took a pass, reasoning that, in the words of 17th-century Quaker apologist Robert Barclay, "All days are alike holy in the sight of God." The Quakers never translated their dismissal of Christmas into legislation in their stronghold in Colonial Pennsylvania. But local meetings, as the Quakers call their assemblies, urged their members to disdain Christmas and to be "zealous in their testimony against the holding up of such days." As late as 1810, the Philadelphia Democratic Press reported that few Pennsylvanians celebrated the holiday.
Observance of Christmas, or the lack thereof, was one way to differentiate among the Christian sects of Colonial and 19th-century America. Anglicans, Moravians, Dutch Reformed, and Lutherans, to name just a few, did; Quakers, Puritans, Separatists, Baptists, and some Presbyterians did not. An 1855 New York Times report on Christmas services in the city noted that Baptist and Methodist churches were closed because they "do not accept the day as a holy one," while Episcopal and Catholic churches were open and "decked with evergreens." New England Congregationalist preacher Henry Ward Beecher remembered decorative greenery as an exotic touch that one could see only in Episcopal churches, "a Romish institution kept up by the Romish church."
No thanks, Conservatrix.
"May God protect me from gloomy saints." - Saint Teresa of Avila
Oh come on! Nobody believes that tripe.
Here, I'll correctly re-state it:
Maybe it is about cramming down kids throats she believes to be true, in the face of unpopular opinion.
I'm very glad the Baptists decided to change their minds about celebrating Christmas!
--- Sorry to say.... you are wrong.
When a little girl has finished opening her Christmas presents and then is looking (with me and my wife) at all the cute and beautiful Christmas wishes and graphics that presented themselves on that Christmas thread on this site....................... she more than blinked when she saw the reindeer getting shredded by the airplane. So, silence would be your best friend right now. Got it?
As I said before on an earlier post, there most CERTAINLY was not ANY intent by the poster to be cruel or anything of the sort. Hear that? I know her better than that. She's a good human, but unfortunately can never admit to a mistake..........which we all make at times.
My only problem with it was......... that the poster can not seem to realize that JUST PERHAPS, that post was not really such a good thing on a wonderful Christmas morning thread as that thread was.
Understand?
Happy New Year
So true.........
:-)
Methinks you just outed yourself.
Do you Does she also disabuse Muslim children in your her classes of their 'mythological belief' in their "spurious Allah character"?
If not, why not?
Her words probably went over the head of the reporter, who is likely paid so little he qualifies for food stamps and has to work a second job (hard to focus on your work when exhausted).
The commercialization of Christmas is a problem, but there is a cultural lesson that goes along with it, if we are going to say that children have to learn the cultural significance of other religious or pseudoreligious "holidays."
that the poster can not seem to realize that JUST PERHAPS, that post was not really such a good thing on a wonderful Christmas morning thread as that thread was.
This is an NOT a children's site -- and we don't have "children friendly" threads. And I'll be damned if I'm going to CENSOR my post just because you cannot understand what is and is not AGE APPROPRIATE reading for children.
It's you who is out of line here, showing an impressionable child a place that is NOT suited for her.
Sounds good here.
LOL.
At four? You must've had a really sad life. I didn't know until I was 10 and that's when my little brother found out too. Don't assume that because you found out at an early age that every other child should too. It's up to the parents to decide when to tell their children and this teacher shouldn't ruin it for them.
Destroying Christmas for a bunch of six-year-olds has nothing to do with heart.
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