Did your school ban carols?

[random member]

How does your school celebrate the holidays? Did your school have a program including carols and songs celebrating Hanukkah and Kwanzaa?

[Loot]

Carols banned? I don't know about chorus, but the Jazz Bands played one of the days before school with Christmas tunes. Then another day the Orchestra played some during 1st period.

[CaptHayfever]

My school pretty much didn't celebrate, period. They didn't ban anything; they just didn't do anything official. I had Christmas decor on my door & in my room, and I'm sure if someone had wanted to go caroling they could've.

As for prior years, I went to Catholic K-8 and high school, so you can guess the focus there. [img]smile.gif[/img]

And remember, "I'm-a Luigi, number one!"

[[sage]]

My school didn't do anything really.

[Brandon2390]

Originally posted by Marth:
My school didn't do anything really.

ditto

[Pikahobbes]

No, and political correctness is retarded. It's a double-edged sword...what if I become angry because you refuse to recognize Christmas?

I support equality and recognizing everyone's religious tradition, not noninclusion.

[Princess Zelda of Hyrule]

None of the ensembles from grades 7 through 12 had any real "holiday concerts" this year to begin with. The instrumental concerts were in mid-November and the choral concerts are scheduled for later this month. The headmaster claimed that he made these arrangements because he didn't want the directors to feel oblidged to limit our repetoire to "holiday pieces," though I suspect he was acting on lawsuit threats. Which is sad - people look forward to holiday concerts. It's a tradition.

The 5th- and 6th-grade choir did have a holiday concert, though. They sang only Christmas songs (the Santa-and-reindeer kind, nothing religious), and got in trouble. Probably because of another lawsuit threat. As a result, our director had to take a lot of music off the program for the upcoming 7-12 concert. Now the top choir is only doing three songs. One of them is a nondenominational prayer (which we're only allowed to keep because we're performing it for a state contest later this month). The other two are gospels pieces which are only justified because they can represent a "different" culture.

Years ago, this would never have happened. Our school used to be very accepting of sacred music. Then again, that was back when our choral program had its act together. We were one of the top choirs in the community, and our product was a lot more impressive and had a lot more redeeming qualities to make up for any offensive mentioning of deities' names. In those days, we could even get away without singing Hanukkah or Kwanzaa songs, because people would be too impressed with the quality of the music to notice. If they did notice, they wouldn't dare confront our director, who obviously knew so much more about music than any of them. But now that the director's gone and we're mediocre (our new director tries, but nobody trusts her...and she doesn't seem to trust us, either), people don't care so much about the actual singing, and so things like the ratio of sacred to secular music are exposed. And parents get angry.

This has got to stop. Before you accuse me of wanting to push Christianity in schools, you have to realize this issue has nothing to do with high school music directors and administrators wanting to "respect diversity." It's all about lawsuits and pain-in-the-butt parents who can't deal with themselves. I don't mind having songs from other cultures included in the program. But showcasing every holiday and religion on earth should not be the goal of a choir concert. The goal should be making music. In all this legal and political crap, we seem to be forgetting that.

One public school in my community, which has a very strong choral program, got threatened with a lawsuit and had to cancel their annual "Messiah" concert, which was something all the seniors looked forward to. That's plain retarded - Handel's "Messiah" is such a famous work that it transends the whole concept of sacred and secular. It's a war-horse. It's something that every singer has to do in his or her life. You haven't gotten a full music education if you aren't familiar with "Messiah." But, no, political correctness before proper education, as always.

Two years ago, a college in my city used to sponsor this "Invitational Choral Festival" where all the top high school choirs from the area would come together for workshops with some famous director. The community choir I sing in is affiliated with that college, so we always got to host the event. Because it wasn't a school-sponsored venue, the choir that wasn't allowed to sing "Messiah" got to sing it there. The director gave them this huge speech about how making good music is so much higher of a priority than satisfying (and in doing so focusing on) all the viewpoints that divide us...

[ January 16, 2005, 10:01 PM: Message edited by: Princess Zelda of Hyrule ]

[imported_Andrew]

Yeah, the choir caroled in pretty much every class. I think there was a Christmas tree in the office as well.

[Princess Zelda of Hyrule]

I don't see why a Christmas tree should be a problem, even for political correctness fanatics. I can understand a manger scene, but a Christmas tree is just a tree with ornaments.

[ocarinagirl]

I'll bet most of the people who ban Christmas stuff don't even realize that most of the symbols associated with Christmas stemmed from pagan traditions.

That being said...my high school always had this thing where a few teachers wandered about the school with various stringed intruments and played carols during the day before Christmas vacation.

It was awesome.

[Princess Zelda of Hyrule]

^That would be SO cool!