Friday, December 16, 2011

A Glee-less Holiday

I have to express a bit of a gripe with Glee's Holiday episode. For a show that prides itself on celebrating people's unique qualities, and showing that its our differences that make us each special, Glee has done a poor job when it comes to its holiday episodes.

Their focus for their holiday episode this year was Christmas. Now I realize that a large majority of the world celebrates Christmas, but Glee really missed a prime opportunity to display the multitude of other holidays that occur over the month of December. There was one throw away mention of Hannukah, Rachel at the end of the episode wishing someone who donated money a Happy Hannukah, and no other mention of any other holidays except Christmas.

Glee has characters built into the show that are Jewish, Rachel and Noah 'Puck' are both Jewish and I wouldn't be surprised if McKinley High has students that celebrate things other than Christmas and even Hannukah. Yet we have everyone singing Christmas songs for the most part during their holiday episode, and spouting what they want for Christmas, including the Jewish Rachel.

I understand that there aren't many rousing songs that represent the other holidays, (although I have a little dreidel, I made it out of clay, is a Hannukah classic) there are other ways to represent and honor the other holidays on the show, and they really have yet to do that. Plus with as inventive as a show as Glee is, I'd love to see some new songs, or parodies of existing songs to represent some of the other cultures and holidays.

So for a show as open-minded as Glee, they were pretty closed-minded when it came to the holidays this year. I hope in the future they consider honoring more than just one culture during the holidays.

1 comment:

  1. Though I don't watch Glee, I concur. There are numerous Holidays in December such as: Kwanzaa, Chanukah, Rohatsu (Buddhism), Yule (Wicca), Zarathosht Diso (Zoroastrianism), and of course...Christmas.

    Sadly, the land of the free still has it's opinions that favor the majority.
    ~ Julie

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