Faisal got a crooked pine tree from the Yemeni guy at the tree lot, but couldn’t bring it home to his Muslim family. So he dragged it into the classroom of his English Language Development teacher, who blogs as Education Realist, and said he wanted to make it into a Christmas tree.
Without a child still at home, the teacher had stopped decorating a Christmas tree years ago. But there were lights and ornaments sitting unused in the garage.
Students “oohed and ahed over” the hand-blown glass and hand-made ornaments,” Ed Realist writes. Faisal selected his favorites from the collection. Classmates decorated the tree and kept it watered.
The school is “wildly diverse,” Ed Realist writes, but Christmas is celebrated openly. Students “sell mistletoe messages and Christmas wreaths through December.”
Four of my nine ELD students are either Muslim or Hindu, and they haven’t been here that long. I carefully explained “secular” as opposed to “religious”, reassuring them that the tree was in celebration of the former. The other half of the class is Catholic, either Guatemalan or Filipino, so were surprised to learn that not everyone celebrated Christmas as a religious event. My math students needed no clarification.
“I have treasured the shared cheer of my classroom tree,” Ed Realist writes. It’s a hit with students too.
I wonder if Julia Ioffe can possibly conceive of a Muslim Palestinian American begging for a free tree, lugging it into his most familiar teacher’s room, simply because he wants to be a part of one of the best holidays ever created. Would she demand that he, too, see Christmas entirely in terms of Christ? Could she not see it as assimilation of the best sort, appreciation for what American culture has to offer?
When school ended for the year, the teacher took the tree with its strands of lights home for the holidays. “I’m looking at it now, shining brightly in the front window,” Ed Realist writes. “Maybe next year I’ll have two trees – one for school, one for home.”