"You can go to children's programs in any season and you will find adaptations of music with new lyrics to tell a story, and you can go to any music store and find music that has been adapted," she added. "It's so that young children know the melodies." Other melodies include "Jingle Bells," "We Three Kings," "O Little Town of Bethlehem" and "Chanukah." "Each one has the lyrics changed in order to tell the story," Messer said. Students at the school will present "The Little Tree's Christmas Gift," a musical production that tells the story of a family going out to buy a Christmas tree.
"Somebody locally, I believe, misunderstood - even after our discussion with them - that one of our teachers took the liberty of changing the lyrics." "There's been a tremendous misunderstanding here," said District Administrator Diane Messer. "This kind of a situation is not so much confusion as it is an insensitivity and an attempt to secularize Christmas, because here they're actually taking a song and mocking it, in my opinion."ĭodgeville School District officials say traditional, unaltered carols will also be sung, and that "Cold in the Night" is part of a decades-old Christmas play that students have performed in years past, and is not an attack on the religious nature of the holiday. "We first try to educate a lot of people who are confused over the law," said Mathew Staver, president and general counsel of Liberty Counsel.
#Lyrics night changes free#
Offended by the new words, he was unable to convince the school not to perform the song and contacted Liberty Counsel, which provides free legal assistance in religious freedom cases. He told the non-profit group Liberty Counsel they are: "Cold in the night, no one in sight, winter winds whirl and bite, how I wish I were happy and warm, safe with my family out of the storm."
The controversy began when the father of a student at Ridgeway Elementary School in Dodgeville, Wis., was upset with the lyrics his child brought home to learn.