Yes, it's that time of year again: that festive season when the war on Christmas swings into "full zealot" mode... amid repeated media assurances that there's no such thing.The following example is particularly dastardly and Lee Jones (writing for spiked!) has the lowdown.
In recent years, as the festive season draws closer, stories inevitably emerge about how ‘political correctness has gone mad’, with council officers censoring Christmas carols on the grounds of ‘religious preference’, re-branding Christmas ‘Winterval’ and preventing people from hanging up decorations or bringing home-made food to school Christmas parties in the name of ‘health and safety’ (1). But for evidence that environmentalism is now overriding ‘PC’ favourites like multiculturalism and health and safety, look no further than Evan James Primary School in Wales, which has banned Christmas cards – on environmental grounds.
‘The reasons for not having cards are endless’, head teacher Nicholas Daniels claims. Although one could speculate that a big motivating factor was to remove the crushing burden of handing out the cards from teachers (‘We are a big school. We have 68 pupils in two classes in year six. The magnitude of cards is horrendous’), Daniels’ argument was explicitly moral. ‘We did take a strong moral ground on the matter… We knew we would face opposition but we decided to do this on moral and environmental grounds. Cards in school cause litter problems and can become a popularity contest about who gets the most.’ (2)
Evan James Primary School pupils are therefore prevented from handing out their own cards on school property. The head teacher at the neighbouring Parc Lewis Primary School has followed suit by discouraging cards and urging parents to ‘donate £1 (instead of cards) for Oxfam and we will send the money to purchase a goat or mosquito net (for a family in Africa)’. This was explicitly ‘to help us get the Eco School Gold Award-Green Flag’ (3).
School kids are already regularly being fed alarmist stories about the coming climate apocalypse, not least through the dissemination of Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth to all schools, despite its well-understood inaccuracies. Now children are being told that even the simple pleasure of exchanging Christmas cards with their friends is sinful, and re-educated to redirect their desires away from warm human interactions to winning an ‘Eco School Gold Award-Green Flag’.
If the report earlier this year which suggested that half of children often lose sleep from worrying about climate change is anything to go by (4), rather than lying awake in excitement waiting for Santa Claus, children will be kept up by scary visions of climate catastrophe...
