Each year beginning around Thanksgiving, talk radio and cable television come alive with reports from the front lines of the “War on Christmas.”  This war has been going on for about 15 years and for those who haven’t followed it, involves stories about a school forbidding the mention of Santa Claus or ordering the immediate removal of colored tissue paper from the halls. 

Each time one of these stories comes up, some parents get so upset about the issue that they appear on TV with Bill O’Reilly and enter into a form of debate whereby each side attempts to see who can express more visible outrage at the fact that a sixth grader at Parker Elementary was given detention for referring to the Christmas tree as a “Christmas tree” instead of a “holiday tree”.  

I usually delight in these stories because they remind me that I grew up in the good old days when we used to give each other presents and make my mother a wreath out of red and green construction paper and my fifth grade picture where I had a bowl cut that is still in my parents’ bathroom; the good old days where I, as a drummer in Mr. Davidian’s clarinet-heavy school band, played an annual “Holiday” concert that included such favorites as “Good king Wenceslas” and an annual performance of “Hot cross buns” which was a chance for the 14,000 clarinetists to play the same wrong note in the “one a penny, two a penny” part.  

But it seems my belief about my town being part of Sarah Palin’s “real America” was based in a naïve assumption that our town was still as I remembered it and hadn’t yet been poisoned by hippy garbage and some ridiculous version of diversity that involves stifling a holiday celebrated in come form by nearly 90% of Americans because three vocal parents pretend their faith is somehow impaired by the use of garland. 

My mother, a retired educator, shared with me a story of her recent days in the infantry working as a substitute music teacher in the school I attended as a child.  Given the impending holidays my mother suggested “Rudolph the red nosed reindeer” to the children.  When she announced the song, two mousey little girls told her they would prefer she not sing the song in their presence and commanded her not to sing it at all.  When my mother inquired as to the basis of their objection the girls informed her that they did not discuss or celebrate Christmas, or Hanukah, or Kwanza, but rather celebrated  “winter solstice” and “vernal equinox” probably with a bunch of other Prius drivers who wear berets and hiking boots around town and make their kids gluten free birthday cake.

I just finished reading Ted Kennedy’s impressive memoir, True Compass, so nearly lost my lunch as my mother recounted her experience.  It’s not so much that Ted Kennedy would have disliked Winter Solstice, or thought stopping others from celebrating Christmas because you celebrate “Vernal Equinox” was the adult equivalent of the guys in my high school that frequently wore skirts to raise awareness of the fact that they didn’t care how much anyone picked on them for wearing skirts, but that I was reminded of the very real struggles that real people had to face a short while ago. Fights for real rights, and real diversity, and against real societal evils that had nothing to do with made-up allergies or anything you could learn about from your friends at the yoga studio, or the couple you met at the underwater birthing class.

My generation, and the one just ahead of mine, have never known any struggle and therefore, have the time and energy to waste complaining to public schools about the singing of songs about secular Christmas icons.  90% of people in my cohort wrote college and grad school essays about the way 9/11 changed their lives though basically none of them suffered any direct impact but 18 months of heightened patriotism as a result.  In a mere forty years we’ve gone from a time when people were fighting for voting equality and educational segregation to whining about trans fats in cafeteria food.

I suppose the one positive aspect of the aversion to celebrating Christmas is that today’s children have a chance to fully appreciate important holidays such as “100^th day of school day”.  In the 1980’s, we celebrated “100’s day”, but it usually involved counting to 100 in unison and kids bringing in collections of 100 things such as bread tags or marbles or goldfish crackers.  I can’t imagine that even today’s sissified parents could find fault with a holiday premised on an alleged excitement about the school year being somewhat more than halfway completed, especially when it falls so close to the Vernal Equinox.