Students at the Belton Lane Primary School in Lincolnshire, England, have been banned from sending Christmas cards to their classmates because the cards are allegedly bad for the environment.
According to Jonathan Mason, head teacher at Belton, students approached him with concerns regarding the “impact of sending Christmas cards on the environment.”
“Throughout the world, we send enough Christmas cards that if we placed them alongside each other, they’d cover the world’s circumference 500 times,” Mason wrote in the letter, which has been posted by Sky News. “The manufacture of Christmas cards is contributing to our ever-growing carbon emissions.”
He continues, “So in order to be environmentally friendly in school we will not be having a post box for Christmas cards from this year onwards.”
“Instead, can we encourage you to save money and the environment buy not sending cards to all of the children in a class individually but instead, if you want to send a card please send one card to the whole class. Teachers can then display the cards in the classroom for everyone to see,” Mason suggests.
One parent at the school observed the hypocrisy behind Mason’s letter to 275 parents.
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“Telling people to stop sending cards in a letter sent out to hundreds of kids stinks of rank hypocrisy…. They are mostly recyclable anyway. I agree that environmental issues are important but I don’t see recyclable Christmas cards as a massive contributor to these problems,” the mother told the Daily Mail.
Other parents bemoaned the school’s lack of holiday spirit.
“It’s great to see them come out of school with their cards and a smile on their faces. It’s a Christmas tradition they have had for a long time and now they are taking it away,” the unidentified parent said. “I know we have to protect the environment, but these are a few Christmas cards once a year and to be told about this on a piece of paper seems contradictory.”
Another parent pointed out that many cards are purchased in the name of charity.
“Why should children have the joy of taken out of Christmas?… And I buy a lot of Christmas cards for charity.”
Several parents observed that Christmas cards are not only recyclable, but are often already made out of recycled paper.
Mike N Bry Collins told the Daily Mail, “Most cards are made from responsibly sourced paper and are recyclable. So what’s the problem. Just out to spoil Christmas for the children by the sound of it. Bah humbug.”
Sadly, the Daily Wire notes Christmas cards have been a bullseye in environmentalist circles since at least 2012, when an article in Mashable advocated for moving to e-cards.
“In 2011 the U.S. Postal Service mail carriers and truck drivers drove 1.25 billion miles and put 125,000 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, according to sources cited in the infographic,” the article argued. “While the amount of postal mail sent appears to be slowly decreasing over the past few years, in 2011 people still went through lots of paper — approximately 168 billion pieces of mail were sent in the U.S. last year. According to the USPS, between Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve last year 16.5 billion cards, letters and packages were delivered. While sometimes sending things via paper mail is unavoidable, making a move to digital ecards cuts down on paper waste and the need for stamps.”
And while Mason’s letter and the school’s policy may seem a bit absurd, it could be worse. In 2017, government officials in the Australian state of Queensland introduced a policy to ban Christmas cards, references to Jesus, and anything classified as “evangelization” from public schools, claiming non-religious students were being “forced” to entertain the Christian beliefs of their classmates. The report by the Department of Education claimed cards “adversely affect the school’s ability to provide a safe, supportive and inclusive environment.”
Furious backlash seems to have stopped the Queensland policy from taking effect in its public schools, at least for now, but each year, Christmas is still targeted by the social progressives on the Left. Is it ever really safe?
Image: mediaphotos via iStock / Getty Images Plus
Raven Clabough acquired her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English at the University of Albany in upstate New York. She currently lives in Pennsylvania and has been a writer for The New American since January 2010.
