Whose Holiday Is This Anyway?

By Charles W. Moore

Some parents in Middleton, Nova Scotia, are unhappy that there has been no Christmas Concert at Annapolis East Elementary School for the past three years, and well they might be.

Whose holiday ("holy day") is Christmas anyway? Who decided that it is no longer a fit subject for public celebration? Reportedly, Annapolis school officials had explained that Christmas, Easter and Halloween (??!) are no longer being celebrated in the school because they're offensive to some children. It beggars credulity that some people's sense of proportion has become so distorted that the birth commemoration of Jesus Christ and the celebration of His resurrection get lumped together with neo-pagan trick-or-treating.

Of course, this construct is selective rationalization anyway. It's not that easy to shuck off the fact that our Canadian social, legal, civil, and cultural traditions are all deeply and inextricably steeped in the principles and observances of the Christian religion. The "winter holiday" is still dated from Christmas -- not Hannukah or Kwanzaa -- and Easter is still a civil holiday, while the holy days of Judaism, Islam Buddhism, Ba'hai, and so on, are not. And rightly so. According to the 1993 Maclean's/Angus Reid poll of religion in Canada, members of all non- Christian religions combined comprised about three percent of the population. Reportedly, 95 per cent of students at Annapolis East Elementary School are of "the dominant culture."

One wonders how the Christian minority in say, Egypt, would fare if it started demanding that observance of Muslim holy days be purged from the schools because Christians deemed such celebration offensive, or how it would be received if the Christian minority in Israel demanded that Jewish holy days not be mentioned in schools there. Both hypothetical scenarios would be unthinkable, again rightly so.

Which begs the question of what exactly has turned Canadian Christians into such a bunch of gutless wimps, seemingly prepared to let their cultural heritage be consigned to the dumpster with barely a whimper of protest -- much less a fight?

The answer, of course, is the astonishing degree of cultural leverage that a self- appointed elite of liberal humanist ideologues now exert on our society. Through a combination of brainwashing and pseudo-intellectual terrorism, these people have deceived and cowed the general populace into largely going along with their political correctness agenda.

For example, Annapolis East Elementary is apparently designated a "peaceful school," which sounds all warm-and-fuzzy "nice" to many well-meaning people, but it has also been cited as the reason some staff at the school reportedly told children this year that poppies are worn in November to "symbolize peacekeeping," rather than to commemorate those who sacrificed their lives fighting in wars to preserve our freedom -- the freedom apparently to become a nation of fatuous nincompoops.

As American Founder Thomas Jefferson noted: "... can the liberties of a nation be thought secure, when we've removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of people that these liberties are the gifts of God."

In place of the traditional Christmas concert at Annapolis East Elementary School this year was a "Musical Memories of the Millennium" concert. Perhaps it didn't occur to the multiculturalism police that the Millennium being celebrated dates from the birth of Jesus Christ. I'm surprised that I haven't (so far) noted anyone protesting the Millennium bash as an offensive religious commemoration.

One Middleton parent quoted by the Halifax Chronicle-Herald protested that "It's too radical. They're taking too many things away from the kids and not replacing them. Even the kids are angry." And rightly so. Christmas and its public celebration are part of their legitimate cultural and religious heritage.

Perhaps due to the sting of belated parental wrath, the school's principal backpedaled a bit this week, telling the Herald's Ian Fairclough that she expects the "Christmas theme" to return next year, rationalizing (on the fly?) that Christmas is "different" because it affects "several cultures."

Oh. That makes it OK I guess; just so long as it's not just Christian culture that's being ignored. Events like Easter and Halloween that "apply to single religions" are still out. The mind boggles. What religion, pray tell, does Hallowe'en apply to -- Druidism? And if Christmas does not "apply" just to the single religion eponymized in its name, what might other Christmas-applicable religions be? The "consumer religion" perhaps.

One is reminded of an anecdote supplied by Christian apologist and writer C.S. Lewis in 1958: "Just a hurried line ... to tell a story which puts the contrast between our feast of the Nativity and all this ghastly 'Xmas' racket at its lowest. My brother heard a woman on a bus say, as the bus passed a church with a Crib outside it,

'Oh, Lor'! They bring religion into everything. Look; they're dragging it even into Christmas now.'"

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