Flaming Stick Arms

With Christmas less than 20 days away, I elected today as the day I'd start preparing my kindergarten students for the approaching holiday. Since science was one of our subjects for the day, I thought we'd talk about winter and snow. As a treat, I brought in a snowman story book and found a corresponding activity in their math book - a dot-to-dot snowman. Surely by the end of class they'd be experiencing those warm, fuzzy feelings that this time of the year brings.

Umm, NOT! As our final morning activity progressed, the dot-to-dot snowman with subsequent coloring, I observed that the snowmen were becoming more sinister looking than jolly, including a snowman of death - colored all black, and a snowman with wounds. Two even set their pictorial snowmen ablaze by coloring flaming stick arms. So much for displaying their artwork to make the classroom look more festive.

I suppose I cannot profess to being entirely surprised by their askew view of the holiday. Despite seeing an increasing number of festive displays over the past 4 years, it was just last Christmas that I came upon a startling discovery. While perusing the tables of Christmas cards at the stationary store, I discovered a whole table of Christmas cards gone wrong. At first glance, it would have appeared as thought the table top was covered in Halloween cards, as those are something we all find ourselves rushing to send out each Fall. Peering up for the cards were faces of ghost, vampires, pumpkins, skeletons, Frankinsteins, and other ghouls with a banner of "Merry Christmas" splashed somewhere on the card. Okay, I know Halloween and Christmas occur within 2 months of each other, but really, you just shouldn't cross the two. A contender with these misguided message bearers where the cards with some cartoon figure guy giving the middle finger while yelling "MERRY X-MAS" and the ones decorated with cartoon piles of poop, plungers, and flies. With this in mind, it's not surprising that many here seem to have no idea what Christmas really is, other than a time of year they should be buying more stuff and apparently sending disturbing cards.