It's a jolly holiday... for some people

A couple weeks ago I was following a PUBYAC thread in which a children's programmer was asking what other programmers do during their Santa storytimes when the invariable child who's too old to believe in Santa stands up and announces this conviction to the entire storytime group. For days various suggestions rolled in for ways to effectively deal with disbelievers. At some point I could take it no longer and I wrote in to the electronic list with the following post:

I have to say I am surprised at how many people still offer Santa or other holiday fare at regularly scheduled storytimes. It's not that I'm against Christmas or holiday-themed programming EVER (see my recent blog post at http://tinyurl.com/yt6yzm for more about that) it's just that clearly we don't live in a totally homogeneous society. And regularly scheduled storytimes, as opposed to specially scheduled programs, are for everybody. As well as you may think you know your population, it's still possible that someone does not "do Christmas" or some other holiday. For that matter, even kids who do celebrate the holiday may have outgrown certain aspects of it-- as some librarians may have discovered the hard way.

I'm not trying to stir up a firestorm (or perhaps I am), I myself "do Christmas"-- the Santa way and the Jesus way as well AT MY HOUSE. But that's wholly immaterial. What I program at the library is totally separate from myself as a person. Do people want holiday stuff? It differs from community to community, but in most places, heck yeah! Lots of kinds of holiday stuff! I still maintain that offering holiday material (usually only certain holidays) at a regularly scheduled storytime is ethnocentric at best, and doesn't offer all our patrons a chance to parent their children in a way they desire.

It could be argued that you've advertised that your storytime will be Christmas-themed, and nonbelievers can stay home. But if you read that last sentence closely, I don't think it's really the message that libraries wish to convey. Why would any patron who didn't celebrate Christmas-- for whatever reason-- feel comfortable sharing that perspective when the holiday has made its way into regularly scheduled programming in a public institution?

(end of post)

I received a handful of replies, ranging from "I'm glad you sent that," to "I've been doing this for fourteen years and nobody has ever complained to me about it." Still, the general consensus seemed to be that if libraries use a half hour storytime to read a handful of stories and sing a song or perform a fingerplay about more than one culture, than surely we're doing something good which allows us to present whichever holidays we prefer, whenever we wish.

It made me wonder, first of all, what are the prime objectives for storytime? And why would we want to use themes that exclude when there are SO MANY that do not? I'm not talking about not programming for holidays in general, I'm only talking about regularly scheduled programming for our regular patrons. I guarantee there are things that each of us do NOT know about our patrons' lives, and we should be very, very glad about that. Some of our patrons do not celebrate Christmas, and I do not believe it is up to us to foist it upon them.

About a week later, on the first day of Hanukkah, I watched a holiday display go up in the Great Hall of the Main Library. In a sense, it doesn't matter whether I think this is a good idea or not. Here's what's really important to me: as an institution, is there an ongoing discussion about how welcome people feel in our buildings and with our staff? Regardless of the ultimate answer reached, is library neutrality a question that's regularly discussed? Because within library neutrality there's much food for thought:

Can we actually have a totally objective, non-political, non-religious, non-biased human institution? Is that what the community really wants from the library? What sort of displays are offensive? Yellow ribbons? Flags? Bunnies? Fir trees? Christmas presents and creches? Halloween costumes? Are restrictions as offensive as inclusions in a public institution?

We want to be welcoming to all and inclusive, yes – but does this mean totally going without holidays? The patrons we want to include celebrate holidays-- it's just that everybody doesn't celebrate the same ones. We may have isolated Christmas because it has religious origins, or because it is commercialized or because we perceive it as belonging to a mainstream culture. But all holidays have meanings in a cultural context, many are directly related to a specific religion, and many that began as religious have been commercialized. Many carry exclusionary baggage limiting their celebration to a specific group – Muslims, Catholics, Jews, African-Americans, et cetera.

If we include any holidays, why exclude any one specifically? What does that say about that holiday and the people who celebrate it? But covering a wide enough swath of holidays seems more like a job description. If we serve the entire community, do we serve whom we perceive as the majority population as well as the minority ones?

Do we expect only people from a certain culture to come to events about holidays in their culture? Will only Asian children come to the Lunar New Year program? If we expect the majority (white, Christian) population to come to programs about minority (Black, Hispanic) people to learn about their interesting ways, do we expect the reverse to also be true? Do children just learn how different those other people are? Do these programs really promote understanding and acceptance? If we only showcase "ethnic" holidays, doesn't that imply that they are merely interesting cultural artifacts for people of that ethnicity? If we don't speak the language and we aren't part of the culture can we still program for the culture so the kids will feel included? Can a white librarian have a Day of the Dead program? If we celebrate holidays as cultural rather than religious events, how do we pick the cultures? Should they only be the cultures represented in your community?

If we exclude all holidays, do we still allow staff to wear religious symbols? OK, allowing religious expression is a law, but do we let people wear anti- or pro-war symbols? Can staff wear snowmen sweaters or wreath pins? Are bunnies an exclusively Christian symbol? Who decided that? And if we didn't do Halloween, could we truly do Harry Potter?

If it were a religious holiday and we celebrated the non-religious aspect, would we be insulting a religion? Do we appear arrogant to kids who celebrate Christmas when we say, "We don't celebrate your holiday because everyone else does." Isn't this like saying, "We don't have books that everyone wants to read because everyone has those books"? If the library is part of the community, should we decorate it like banks and the city hall and the surrounding neighborhood? Should we look like our community, or be a respite from the media-driven holiday-overdrive of it?

Holidays, like seasons, are what pass our days and make the landscape of our human lives a little more festive. Let's face it: everybody loves a holiday. But decorations are not just feel-good wall brightener. They are a statement. What, exactly, does the library wish to say?