Moslem Christmas?

Now write a list of things you want from Santa,” my 3rd-grade teacher casually instructed as she handed out a sheet of paper for us to write on.
I saw it coming – another filler assignment to occupy our attention for at least an hour or so in the last few days before the holiday break.
“I don’t celebrate Christmas, can I have something else to do?”
I spent the next 30-minutes doodling on the back of a reef coloring sheet. My classmates were in disbelief.
“Dag, you don’t get nothing on Christmas? That’s crazy! I couldn’t be no Muzlim.”
“That’s ’cause she don’t believe in Jesus, she believes in Ola.”
“No and Santa doesn’t even have anything to do with …”  They weren’t tryna hear any of it. All the comebacks I had stored up over the years from being in this same exact situation fell on deaf ears. At 8-years-old, all they could process was the shock of me waking up on December 25th without any gifts waiting for me while I was purposely avoiding red and green crayons – I was done with the holiday hoopla at this point.
This was as broad as religious discussions got in my public school elementary classrooms. Year after year, I sat through Christmas plays, visits from Santa, and tree decorating activities. There was an occasional presentation on Kwanzaa, which usually only lasted a day and included a lackluster call-and-response of a few of the principles. I also remember learning a tidbit about Jewish dreidels and Hanukkah. Exposure pretty much stopped there.

At the time, I didn’t think much of it. I was used to standing out either because of my name, not pledging to the flag in the morning or not having gifts to brag about after Xmas or Easter. I always saw my faith as outside of the norm, something I only learned about at home or schooled my peers on during recess.
As an adult who’s taken opportunities to learn about other cultures and belief systems, I see the problem in this limited and one-sided exposure in our school systems and when I continue to come across stories about parents being upset over their children learning about Islam in school, I find it so ironic. A teacher in Tennessee was reprimanded last week for including Islamic symbols in classroom decorations (which also included Xmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa decorations).  There was also the case of a mother in Michigan being “outraged” over her child’s assignment on the 5 major religions in the world because, Islam.
What is the harm in learning about another faith or its holiday traditions when so much of our school system curriculum shoves days like Christmas and Easter down students’ throats?
One of the main purposes of education should be to give students as much cultural insight as possible, not to program and indoctrinate one religion over the other. America is a mostly Christian country, so I get the imbalance to a degree, but the reaction of these parents and my experience in school says a lot about where we are as a society. Of course the media plays a role in this type of unnecessary paranoia with equating Islam with terrorism; but, an educational system too scared or unwilling to give children an accurate understanding of the diversity that makes up our world is a huge part of the reason so many of us grow up to be clueless, biased adults.