View from the North 40: How Principal Grinch gave back Christmas

I know, the Christmas presents have been opened, half of them are already broken or the batteries drained. The tree and all the decorations have come down. The Christmas songs have been cut off, cold turkey, at midnight Dec. 25. It’s over. Christmas 2018 is finished. But before you throw it in the trashcan with the rest of the non-recyclables and move on, I have to bring up one Christmas-related news item that I just cannot believe I missed.

An Omaha, Nebraska, school principal got suspended for canceling Christmas.

Manchester Elementary School Principal Jennifer Sinclair sent out a faculty memo Dec. 3 explaining that since not everyone at the school celebrates Christmas, no one in the school would get to celebrate Christmas.

Outraged parents and teachers went public with the memo, including sending a copy to Liberty Counsel, a national conservative Christian legal nonprofit in Florida.

Liberty Counsel, which posted the memo on its website, LC.com, sent the school district a letter outlining the legal problems with Sinclair’s actions and threatened to sue if the policy wasn’t reversed.

The school district replied that district policies are sound, but Sinclair’s interpretation is a full bubble off center. So her guidance was nixed, and Sinclair was placed on administrative leave Dec. 6.

In her memo, Sinclair said — without regard for the rules of grammar — that she comes “from a place that Christmas and the like are not allowed in schools, as over the years in my educational career, this has evolved into the expectation for all educators. … I will do my best to communicate the expectation from here on out, which aligns with my interpretation of our expectations as a public school.”

Sinclair also said that it made her “uncomfortable” to have to give specifics, but she would do it for the teachers who, apparently, needed all this obvious stuff spelled out for them.

Things Sinclair deemed acceptable included instruction on holidays around the world; gift making and giving; sledding; winter clothing; snow people; snowflakes; gingerbread people; hot chocolate; polar bears; penguins; yetis; and Olaf from the animated film “Frozen.”

Not acceptable were Santa and Christmas clip art; Christmas trees; Christmas carols, music or movies and their characters; Scholastic Christmas books; ornaments; red and green stuff; reindeer; and candy canes because turned upside down they look like a “J” — which she said stands “for Jesus. The red is for the blood of Christ, and the white is a symbol of his resurrection.”

Interestingly, she signed of by calling herself the Grinch, which seems inappropriate, because he is green and wears traditional Santa red.

Also interestingly that whole thing about the “candy-cane-J stands for Jesus and so forth” is bunk, and a quick check on reliable and respected websites would’ve told her that. Though I’m a little sad to say that out of the 10 articles I read, only the online Christian Post reported bothering to fact-check that bit, using Snopes.com and Smithsonian.com.

I would argue that Sinclair should be let go, not for this debacle so much as her massive display in the memo of incorrect grammar, two counts of copyright infringement, with use of Olaf and the Grinch, and a shameless lack of adequate research, but the school district is not commenting on their next move.

Sinclair did issue an apology Dec. 5 to the parents and her staff for the negative attention her memo brought to the school and the district.

My guess is Sinclair was visited by the three wise ghosts — Gingerbread man, Olaf and Sasquatch — who brought her gifts of a coat, franks and beans, and a fur ball. After they transported Sinclair to her past, present and alternate future — in which all the children had become either polar bear herders or snowflakes — her heart grew three sizes that day.

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Of course, Elf on a Shelf is Christmas-related. Everybody knows Elf’s tradition started when he built that legendary shelf in the manger to store the gold, frankincense and myrrh out of reach of the little baby Jesus. Who gives a baby choking hazards for Christmas? Seriously, at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40/.