Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
News

Santa Claus Furor

Second grader Stevie Cohen dropped a bombshell on his second grade classmates yesterday morning — Santa Claus does not exist.

Cohen, retaliating for a stolen eraser, loudly informed his former best friend Arthur Grant that there is no Santa Claus and that Christmas presents come from parents.

The announcement turned Miss Richard’s language arts class into pandemonium, as half the class broke into heated arguments while others burst into tears, thinking that Stevie meant that Santa Claus was dead. The debates continued into recess and lunch hour, resulting in glue spills, pulled hair and, in one case, a seriously torn T-shirt.

An attempt by Principal Hernandez to broker a peace only added fuel to the fire, when his public statement calling for toleration of all viewpoints sparked outrage from a contingent of conservative parents, who accused him of “declaring war on Christmas.”

Cohen initially seemed pleased by the chaos he had created, but as of press time he was almost inconsolable upon being informed that the tooth fairy is likewise a fiction.

“I guess we should all believe what we believe,” Grant told the Backward, drying tears.

“You can believe that the moon is made of green cheese,” fourth grader Sophie Bucknall told this reporter, “but that doesn’t make it so.”

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.