School cancels annual Santa visit, parents pull children out of class.
AB Wire
Why should Christmas be celebrated for five days in the United States, while festivals for religions like Hinduism and Islam be ignored and relegated to as a minority festival?
That question and allegation of discrimination by a Jewish mother of a child in kindergarten in a school in San Jose, California, led to the cancellation by the school authorities of an annual Christmas tradition: a school trip to see Santa.
The parents of other kindergarten students, however, pulled their kids out of class recently to protest the cancellation, reported Yahoo! Parenting.
For the past 10 years, students at Sartorette Elementary School in San Jose, Calif., have taken a field trip to a local coffee shop to deliver letters to Santa, sit on his lap, and drink hot chocolate.
The trip was canceled after one class mother, Talia (who has withheld her last name from the media), complained that the tradition was exclusive of other religions, which don’t believe in Santa or celebrate Christmas, said the report.
Talia, who is Jewish, says the issue is bigger than one religion.
“This is not a Jewish issue for me,†she told NBC Bay Area. “It’s an inclusion issue. We can’t spend five days on just one culture. That’s fostering intolerance. When Christmas is given the same time, or [more] time, than American holidays, like Veterans Day, then kids don’t feel as American.â€
Talia’s daughter is the only Jewish student in the class, but she told NBC that six other cultures are represented in the class but are not celebrated in school.
“The field trip was tied to two writing workshops that were supposed to be spent writing to Santa,†she told KGO, reported Parenting. “There was also a reindeer party and other Christmas related activities. There was nothing done for the Diwali festival. We have two Hindu girls in our class. There was nothing done for Ramadan. We have a Muslim boy in our class.“ A certified public school teacher, Talia said the Santa lesson was better taught outside of class hours.
After Talia raised her concerns with the school board, she and the superintendent agreed on a compromise: students would still go to the local coffee shop for hot chocolate, but there would be no Santa during school hours, and students would write letters to the coffee shop owner instead. But since the event was open to the community, the coffee shop owner couldn’t cancel Santa’s appearance, so the school trip was called off instead.
Parents angry about the scrapped tradition spoke out against Talia in person and on social media. The mother says one parent called her “the one who started the war on Christmas.†In response to the trip’s cancellation, about two dozen parents staged a school walkout, taking their kids out of class to see Santa on their own, according to NBC Bay Area.