From the very beginning, the rural school in South Dakota during the first half of the 1900’s served as a community center for the local area. The earliest schools were, in fact, the product of local community effort. It was the people who decided where to locate the school, how to build it, and selected a board of local citizens to manage it.
At the time, to most settlers in rural Dakota, the community was as far as they were concerned, their universe. Community life was relatively simple, but its cultural importance was enormous.
The school’s primary responsibility was education, but the convenient location made it a natural gathering place for a variety of community functions. Because community life was vital to the citizens, the school’s role as a community center rivaled its educational value.
The school served as a community center in two respects: it offered school programs, and it provided a meeting place for gatherings not related to the school. These community activities at the school benefited local educational efforts by helping to engender popular support for education and at the same time create an awareness of the school’s needs. In return, the school served as a social center and offered entertainment.
Many schools offered a wide variety of entertaining programs, none more popular and anticipated each year than the Christmas program. It was the festive highlight of the year and everyone in the community squeezed into the tiny school.
Parents beamed as their children performed and other local residents witnessed what was a secular and religious program of plays, songs, poems, and everyone joining in singing some of the songs.
The spirit of the season, perhaps more than anything else, brought community camaraderie to its peak at the Christmas programs. Even bitter December weather did not deter the audience from attending. Every person in the community crowded into the school to witness the students’ efforts despite the weather.
Occasionally blizzards on the evening of the program would force everyone to stay at the school overnight. At one school in the Midwest where this occurred, the program was performed for a second time that evening.
Children wrapped coats about themselves and went to sleep on the floor close to the stove. Adults conversed or played cards and drank coffee the night through. They returned home, early the next morning.
The community expected an elaborate Christmas program, and the teacher and students saw that they got one. Preparation for the annual event began as early as October when the teacher selected the songs, poems, skits, and other activities.
Practice would begin immediately after Thanksgiving and rehearsals of plays, poems, and other recitations would gradually take up more time until regular instruction actually stopped altogether for a day or two before the program. Every child had some part in addition to group singing.
Today, the attitudes of the public have changed since the first half of the 20th Century regarding the celebration of Christmas. A Pew Research Center study reported on December 12, 2017, with this headline: “Americans Say Religious Aspects of Christmas Are Declining in Public Life – Shrinking Majority Believe Biblical Account of Birth of Jesus Depicts Actual Events.”
The report went on to say: “Not only are some of the more religious aspects of Christmas less prominent in the public sphere, but there are signs that they are on the wane in Americans’ lives and personal beliefs as well. For instance, there has been a noticeable decline in the percentage of U.S. adults who say they believe that biblical elements of the Christmas story – that Jesus was born to a virgin for example – reflect historical events that actually occurred. And although most Americans still say they mark the occasion as a religious holiday, there has been a slight drop in recent years in the share who say they do this.”
To be sure, while the public’s commemoration of Christmas may have less of a religious component now than in the past, the share of Americans who say they celebrate Christmas in some way has hardly budged at all. Nine-in-ten U.S. adults say they still continue to celebrate the holiday. The majority will gather with family and friends. About half will attend church on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day.
Gallup, in a December 21, 2022 report stated: “More than a third of Americans have fallen away from attending religious services regularly in their lifetime, as 31% report attending a church, synagogue, mosque or temple weekly or nearly weekly, whereas 67% say they attended that frequently when growing up. Two-thirds also report that, to the best of their knowledge, their parents attended weekly or nearly weekly in their youth, suggesting the changes in church attendance have occurred within the current generation of parents and children.”
This Christmas, the U.S. remains a religious nation, with about 80% having a religious affiliation, including about seven in 10 who affiliate with a Christian faith. However, the U.S. is clearly a less religious nation than in the past, given steep declines over the past 20 years in religious identification, church membership, and church attendance.
Author Clarence Shoemaker, originally published in the Gregory Times-Advocate on December 13, 2023