Greetings!
Winter Holidays – what a boring title for all the excitement that Kindergarteners and First Graders feeling bubbling inside themselves for the last weeks and days of November and for all the weeks and days of December.
The holidays have such interesting names, though. What do they mean??
Kwanzaa
Hanukkah
Santa Lucia
Las Posadas
Sinterklaas
Diwali
Epiphany
Christmas
Yule
Eid
Even the most ordinary, New Year’s Day, is a puzzle… how can a day be a year??
What wonderful names! What mysterious names! What happens on those days? Why are they? Where are they?? What are they?
We will roam the globe and touch briefly on each one, whether we have anyone who regularly participates in it or not. As I have said before somewhere, my responsibility to the children of the privileged, the monocultural children I mostly teach, is to (try to) help them to see that their world view is merely one, not The One.
They will be puzzled, I am sure. I don’t mind puzzling them a bit as long as they begin, just Begin, to wonder about the rest of the world. As Anne Green Gilbert says, “Curiosity leads to Awareness, Awareness leads to Change.”
