It's Beginning to Sound (Depressingly) Like Christmas: Four Tips for Educators
No, I'm not referring to the abundant winter/holiday programs happening in schools everywhere this month. I embrace seasonal performances. Having organized and directed--at a minimum--hundreds of candlelit concerts, rowdy assemblies, Jingle Bell parades and cocoa-fueled trips to nursing homes, I'm down with whatever musical merriment happens in schools in December.
What I find disheartening is the gearing up of the Faux War on Christmas, using public schools as staging ground for stirring up unnecessary and phony conflict. From where I stand, as a 30-year music educator who dealt with the Christmas Conundrum annually, there has never been a genuine, organized assault on the commercial spectacle that revs up in early November and dominates the media and public spaces for weeks. In fact, getting all huffy about greetings, menorahs and nativity scenes feels like uncivil, bullying behavior, something we shouldn't be gleefully modeling for students.
Also--in all those years, through all those performances, I had a small handful complaints about inappropriate music selection, images, performances or even stage decorations. The holiday season is so all-encompassing in America that you really have to be scraping to come up with something to be unhappy about.
Several years ago, I was the assigned mentor for a first-year music teacher in my district. She was pretty wonderful--well-trained, personable and bursting with new ideas about putting on a
