When I was a kid, we sang Christmas carols in school each December. We had Christmas concerts, Christmas parties and Christmas dances. None of that generic “holiday” stuff, no programs full of numbers like “Frosty the Snowman” and other winter ditties carefully chosen for their lack of religious content. Oh, we sang some of those, but we also had the standards, all the sweet songs about the manger and the baby.

In Australia, one of the most secular countries in the world, where only about 10 percent of the population regularly attend church, my kids’ public schools still held Christmas pageants. One stands out in my memory. My oldest child, then 10, was chosen for the coveted role of Mary. She entered the school gym astride a friend dressed as a donkey and, when the proper moment arrived, she whipped from under her skirt her brother’s anatomically correct boy baby doll, Anthony, and plonked him in the makeshift manger. The kids then launched into a down-under version of “Deck the Halls” renamed “Deck the Shed,” which was mainly about cracking open a tinnie and having a good old time. (Remember that Australian Christmas is a summer holiday; many families spend it at the beach.)

But back home in much-more-pious America, there’s not much Christmas left at school. When I returned, I missed it. I felt sorry for my kids, deprived of all that rich lore that had always accompanied my childhood’s Decembers. As a couple of years passed, I realized to my regret that my two younger ones didn’t know any of the old carols. What to do?

And then, one winter, the answer came with all the appropriate blinding simplicity. I’d never been much of a churchgoer myself. But where do you go if you want songs about the baby Jesus? Duh! You go to church!

So I started herding them to Christmas Eve services each year, which they loved and drank in eagerly. And one Christmas Eve, in a little church in North Carolina, I looked around at all the good people gathered there and thought, I need to come back here. I did that, and found a home there, as did my kids, along with all the Jesus we needed.

Meanwhile, back at the local high school, the choral director put together a winter holiday program that was half-sacred, half-secular. The man was much beloved at the school, and was also a very committed Christian. On the back of the program, he wrote a little homily about keeping Christ in Christmas, and at the end of the program he arranged for a girl dressed as Mary, cradling a doll-baby Jesus, to walk through the audience and up onto the stage.

One of the kids in that choir was a close friend of ours, and her dad is Jewish. She was deeply upset at this intrusion, as she saw it, being forced to participate in something that was, although lovely, not part of her beliefs. She agonized about whether she should sing in the concert. But she also loved the choir director and didn’t want to hurt his feelings or cause a fuss by letting him know the effect he was having on her. In the end she did sing with her schoolmates, but the experience for her was far from joyful.

This year there are a lot of folks saying that Christ is taken out of Christmas too much, that stores and schools should put away the generic holiday greetings and songs and return to the traditional stuff. As a Christian, I disagree.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t look to department stores for my religion — nor do I think schools are the appropriate place for it. It’s true, we can’t return to the comfortable days of Norman Rockwell Christmases with creches in the school gym and “Silent Night” sung at the winter concert.

But, people, we are still the dominant religion in this country. We are hardly being persecuted. We are totally, utterly free to celebrate Jesus’ birth in our churches and our homes, and no one is allowed to stop us from doing that.

At times when I miss the old carols in the school concerts, I think about my young friend and the many like her who have had to endure similar spiritual torment each December. Do I go along with it? Do I make a fuss? Do I slink away and miss out on an important school ritual?

Putting a child through this is not what Christmas is about. In my book, it’ s unfeeling, uncharitable — in short, un-Christian.

— Susanna Rodell is editorial-page editor of The Charleston Gazette. Her e-mail address is srodell@wvgazette.com.