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Consider this quote from Abe Lincoln
"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
Holiday Programs. That’s what they call them now. When I was a little man running around in blue jeans and a green Pioneer seed corn cap they were called Christmas Concerts. It isn’t so much that I mind the change of wording so much; Holiday Program has a nice ring to it I guess, but I do miss the music of the season.
In a warm gym, where I took part in many games of dodge ball-rugby at noon on a cold winters day, I sat, along with other adults, watching the elementary kids from Dexter as they sang their way through the better part of a cold Monday evening.
The skit was cute, costumes magnificent and band not too shabby for 5th graders (besides no one could really compare with attempting to study for finals in honor study hall with the strains of Pink Floyd echoing through the third floor of the school) and even I got a huge chuckle out of the twangy version of Santa Done Got Stuck in the Chimney. But as I sat there with entirely too many layers of clothing on I thought back to those days when Mrs. Sellers would first teach us to sing, tapping her foot along with us, and reminding us that Silent Night was not a funeral march.
At what point did we allow the touchy feely political correct police to invade? Somewhere in my life of servitude to a number of bosses who never paid me what I was really worth they snuck right into the elementary music department and scooped up every darn good Christmas song there is. Stealing them away to some banished area of the playground where no kid was allowed to go.
Have any of us forgotten the first time we stood to sing Away in the Manger, or heard Gene Autry sing Rudolph, or even the first time our voices joined in hundreds of others singing O Holy Night as we shivered a bit when the voices admonished us to “fall on your knees”? Have we become so completely moved away from Christ that Christmas music…good Christmas music only deals with Santa and gifts?
One cannot blame this on the educational system playing a game of duck and cover as the toy train running circles around the Christmas tree jumps the tracks and takes out millions of harmless dust bunnies, but have we really allowed ourselves to let those who “might” be offended by the mere mention of Christ in a song, to completely disregard the lessons that any good music historian learns? And in forgetting that Christmas songs were written by writers employed by the churches and that Christmas at its very core is based on the birth of Christ, have we suddenly woken up to find that all our gifts are brightly wrapped underwear? Have we taken this too far?
Certainly there is nothing Hollow about Holloween, nor East about Easter, nor even Saintly about St. Patrick’s Day…but will we, have we…allowed people who mean well to turn Christmas into Columbus Day with presents?
Perhaps I’m taking this too personally, perhaps I’m out of touch, but it might seem to me that in educating our children we may just forget that regardless of what you think about God and Christ that perhaps the lessons there might just be as important as the touchy feely garbage being pontificated in the walls of our educational establishments these days. The way to solve this perhaps is to keep the kids going to church and Sunday School no matter how much they complain…
And as for me, I’ll take another helping of Silent Night, O Come all Ye Faithful and Little Drummer Boy, over Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer, because in Grandma’s case she should have been walking home after too much egg nog in the first place.
See you next week…Remember, we’re all in this together.