By Eric Buehrer, President, Gateways to Better Education

November-December 1996 – Millions of public school students are being miseducated about Thanksgiving and Christmas. Schools now have winter concerts instead of Christmas concerts; caroling is out; Christmas trees are taboo, and even red and green colors are banned from bulletin boards during December in many schools – lest someone think the school is promoting Christmas.

Robin Woodworth of Boothwyn, Pennsylvania, was shocked at the censorship in her son’s classroom. He came home from school one day explaining that when he wrote Merry Christmas on the chalkboard the teacher made him erase it for fear she would get in trouble.

One kindergarten teacher from Charlotte, North Carolina, wrote us that their Christmas program was changed to “The Five Senses of Winter,” and the word Christmas could not be uttered at school.

Trained in a new culture
The move to completely secularize Thanksgiving and Christmas has come about partly because of misconceptions about Court rulings on how to handle religion in public schools and partly because of deliberate attempts by some to alter our culture.

The National Association for the Education of Young Children, an organization with 95,000 preschool and elementary teachers, publishes an “Anti-Bias Curriculum” that attacks the holidays.

For Thanksgiving this organization encourages teachers to focus on the plight of Native Americans. Most students never learn that during the first Thanksgiving celebrated in America in 1621 the Pilgrims feasted, prayed, and sang songs of praise to God for three days. They never read what Lincoln wrote in establishing the first annual celebration of Thanksgiving Day in 1863. After listing the many blessings America had enjoyed Lincoln said: “No human counsel hath devised, nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the most high God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American people.”

Thanksgiving is a national holiday established by our government specifically to give thanks to God for the blessing we have received during the previous year. Yet, the trend is to distort Thanksgiving – and Christmas as well.

For the latter, the anti-bias handbook suggests three options: 

1) Integrate December holidays from several cultural groups into one non-religious celebration;
2) Do December holidays other than Christmas;
3) Don’t do December holidays at all in the classroom.

Putting Christ back in Christmas
In the midst of these attacks on our culture I am happy to report good news: many parents and teachers are beginning to gently restore traditional holidays to their schools. The movement is just beginning but it is growing and gaining momentum.

As a former public school teacher I know that the best way to restore the holidays to the classroom is to convince educators that it is not only legal to do so but is the right thing to do, as well. It is not enough to simply change the school district’s policy; we must help the teacher see the holidays as important cultural lessons.

Four years ago I wrote “A Gift For Teacher” – an eight-page Christmas card that parents can give to their children’s teachers. It expresses, in a nonthreatening way, how public school teachers can legally teach about Christ’s birth, and that the ACLU even lost a landmark case when it tried to stop a school district from having a very permissive policy for teaching about religious holidays.

We added a card for Thanksgiving, in which a talking turkey explains the history of Thanksgiving and why it is a national holiday. The card includes sample lesson plans that are constitutionally sound. We also added a card for Halloween discouraging teachers from emphasizing the occult, and a card for Easter encouraging educators to teach accurately about the Resurrection. Over the last three years parents and teachers from across the country have ordered more than 80,000 cards! Our goal, now, is to inform every public school teacher, administrator, and school board member in America with the truth about how religious holidays can be taught.

Positive results
Bev Remillard, a mother of two, in Laguna Hills, California, used the card as a way to open a dialogue with her children’s teachers. “The card was a tool for expressing to the teachers what I felt,” she said. “It made it easier for me to approach them knowing I had documentation to back me up, and the card’s tone was not threatening.”

A teacher wrote, “Before I received my copy of the card, someone else had posted it in the teachers lounge under the caption: Do you know your rights? Nativity pictures have come out of the bottom of drawers where they have been hiding for years!”

Many churches have used the cards to canvas their school districts. For example, Hope Church in Wilton, Connecticut, placed a large quantity of cards in the church foyer for parents to give to their children’s teachers. Using the cards, members have had an effective outreach to several school districts in their area.

To help churches reach their communities, we have developed “Touch the Children Campaign” through which the ministry offers a church promotional kit with a four-minute video, a table top display to offer the cards to church members and bulletin inserts.

Rekindling The Holidays At School
Here is what we’ve learned from our success over the last few years. We hope it will help you restore more openness to holidays in your school:

1. Pray that God would open the heart and mind of your child’s teacher and principal.
2. Realize that most teachers censor the holidays out of ignorance and fear, not hostility toward Christianity.
3. Tell the teacher and principal how you feel about the ban on holiday celebrations.
4. Offer legal documentation to support your position.
5. Legal reasoning alone is not enough. Educators also need to be convinced that teaching about the holidays is part of a good education.
6. If the teacher is uncomfortable teaching about the holiday, offer to be a guest speaker and tell the class how your family celebrates the holiday. 

To order the cards, write to Gateways To Better Education, P.O. Box 514, Lake Forest, CA 92630. Order by toll-free telephone: (800) 929-1163. You can order any combination of Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter cards (includes envelopes) for $4.00 each (minimum order of two cards), or 10 - 49 for $3.50 each, or 50 - 99 for $3.00 each, or 100 + for $2.75 each (all prices include postage and handling). CA residents add 7.75% tax. Churches, ask about our “Holiday Restoration” campaign kit.