Sheltering your child from normal secular American holidays

Dear Gveret Dellacroce,

I’m sorry it took me so long to get back to your message regarding excusing your child from our class TuBishvat celebrations; this is a unique situation. As you have probably heard by now, Teresa participated in our class celebration and had a wonderful time, so I assume it’s no longer a problem (and perhaps you will reconsider your objections to her participation next year?).

In your message, you characterized Tu Bishvat as a Jewish religious holiday, and therefore inappropriate for classroom celebration in a public school. I was shocked to read this because as everyone knows, Tu Bishvat is not religious in any way. It’s a celebration of the trees and nature and the coming of spring, and Tereesa probably enjoyed eating all kinds of fruits at our party.

ALL of us grew up attending school Tu Bishvat parties; I am an atheist and I grew up enjoying Tu Bishvat parties, so I can definitely tell you there’s nothing religious about it otherwise there’s no way my parents would have allowed me to participate, myself!

I’m truly baffled by your message because I had no idea you were such frum Christians that you didn’t celebrate secular holidays. I am not even sure how to accommodate your request to exclude Theresa from all of our Tu Bishvat activities because as you saw from our schedule, we had many activities over the whole week. Kids love holidays, you know, and it’s not fair to the other kids to cancel all holiday celebrations just because one kid somehow finds secular holidays offensive. If it were just the party I’d be happy to send her to do library to do some math worksheets but it’s really a whole week of activities and you want to exclude her from all of it. I have no idea how to handle this. What are we supposed to do, cover her eyes so she doesn’t see the holiday decorations in the hallways? Devise a totally separate lesson plan because she is too frum to learn about trees? Next year, I will try to remember to send you a list of planned activities so you can decide which ones she can’t do, and I will send her to the library for those activities. But I really hope you will spend this next year thinking about this. If you’re going to be so strict in sheltering your child from normal secular American holidays, maybe you should send her to a Christian school where they only celebrate Christian holidays, not secular ones. Or maybe just loosen up, let your daughter be a kid and learn about secular American holidays with her friends?

Efraim Lehrer
5th grade Teaching Team

#MedinatAmerica