Gold, Myrrh and Censorship

Christmas time in Aberdeen. Store windows, street displays, mall music all proclaim it.
It's Christmas time everywhere but in the public schools where Christmas has been censored. Christmas concerts will now be called " holiday concerts" purportedly out of sensitivity to those religions other than Christianity.
Calling Christmas " holiday " may seem to encourage diversity, but it really ends up doing the opposite.
When my family moved to Aberdeen eight years ago, we were delighted with the school Christmas concerts because they were full of everything our California schools had abandoned years earlier: traditional favorites, black spirituals, medieval canticles, all rich in color and meaning.
There were harmonized carols, rapped-up carols, jazzy carols and carols done with motions. There were sometimes Hanukkah songs, songs we enjoyed because they helped our kids remember their Jewish name and heritage.
In California, all that was left of Christmas were a couple of holly and snowman songs. Everything with a hint of meaning was tracked down like termites and destroyed. What was left was a group of songs that sounded alike and were virtually the same song in different disguises.
They had the same orchestrations and the same cliched message: We are the world (future, children, hope). We can do anything if we put our minds to it, and everything will be rosy after we do.
These were Pepsi commercial songs, Muzak songs, full of exaggerated sentiment. These pieces had all the texture of a sidewalk after an ice storm. None could be remembered two years later.
It's sad that in the name of diversity, we teach kids to all think alike, and compel them to swallow what's left over of a cultural dish that has been leeched of all flavor and spiritual meaning.
I don't like the idea of compelling kids to worship against their beliefs, but Orwellian name changes and religious fumigation tactics are extreme reactions.
A columnist once compared the deliberate secularization of our culture to a disagreement about clothes. Some, he said, would say that since people from different backgrounds insist on different clothing styles we should all go without clothes so that no one style is dominant.
Well, the last I looked at the cultural thermometer, the temperature was about 20 below, with crime, drugs and a general callousness toward life all serious problems. It's not a good day for casting off clothes, or for stripping spiritual content from school music.

Donna Marmorstein 1996 This was a guest editorial for the American News