Merry Christmas after all! And Happy Belated Thanksgiving!

On Dec. 13, the New York Post ran this story:

Santa Claus is banned. The Pledge of Allegiance is no longer recited. “Harvest festival” has replaced Thanksgiving, and “winter celebrations” substitute for Christmas parties.

New principal Eujin Jaela Kim has given PS 169 in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, a politically correct scrub-down, to the dismay of teachers and parents.

“We definitely can’t say Christmas, nothing with Christmas on it, nothing with Santa,” PTA president Mimi Ferrer said administrators told her. “No angels. We can’t even have a star because it can represent a religious system, like the Star of David.”…

A memo last month from assistant principal Jose Chaparro suggested a “harvest festival instead of Thanksgiving or a winter celebration instead of a Christmas party.” He urged staff to “be sensitive of the diversity of our families. Not all children celebrate the same holidays.”

Ninety-five percent of the 1,600 kids at PS 169 are Asian or Hispanic.

And I'm sure those Hispanic and Asian children got really upset at the idea of "Thanksgiving."

In a recent directive to all schools, the city Department of Education said it permits holiday symbols including Christmas trees, kinaras (candleholders for Kwanzaa), dreidels, Hanukkah menorahs and the Islamic star-and-crescent. Displays that “depict images of deities, religious figures or religious texts” are prohibited.

In a memo to staff this month, PS 169 business manager Johanna Bjorken added: “In case you are wondering about grey areas: Santa Claus is considered an ‘other religious figure.’ ”

Well, he is St. Nick!

Santa was a part of the holidays at PS 169 for years. Joseph Iorio, a longtime assistant principal and the acting principal who preceded Kim, recalled state Assemblyman Felix Ortiz visiting the school dressed as Santa “many times.”

Iorio also said he tapped student leaders to lead the Pledge of Allegiance every Monday morning. When Kim arrived, the school-wide pledge ended.

?A DOE spokesman said classrooms can recite the pledge “at the teacher’s discretion.” But PS 169 teachers said that Kim never told them they could do so.

Fortunately, it took only one day for sanity to return to Brooklyn. On Dec. 15 the Post reported:

The good news arrived at PS 169 in Sunset Park on Monday morning, a day after The Post exposed the bizarre PC extremism of Principal Eujin Jaela Kim.

District 15 Superintendent Anita Skop stormed in the front door at 9:50 a.m., and minutes later, two fifth-grade boys were brought to the main office to lead a recital over the public address system of the Pledge of Allegiance, teachers told The Post.

As The Post reported on Sunday, the pledge hadn’t been said over the loudspeakers since the beginning of the school year. Kim, 33, became principal in May 2014.

Santa Claus is now reinstated at the school, and Department of Education officials said on Monday that the Pledge of Allegiance will be recited over the PA system every morning, in response to concerns from the community.

I'm wondering where Principal KIm went to ed school. I wouldn't be surprised if it was Columbia Teachers College, which in 2008 imposed an Ideological litmus test on all its students, according to the academic-freedom website FIRE. America's premier ed school began imposing a requirement that its students demonstrate a "commitment to social justice" that would be regularly assessed by faculty and administrators. "Social justice," as we all know is code for ultra-left politics.