It's a poem.
It's not "taught as a religion". She is "teaching religion" if she seeks to disabuse the children of the Santa Claus "myth" out of a fear he is usurping Jesus Christ. She is a hypocrite of the highest order.
Santa Claus is a cultural persona and if this idiotic person is going to refrain from "teaching" anything that she disagrees without without positing a "disclaimer" to the kids, she cannot read anything by EB White "people cannot have mice as sons"; "farm animals cannot talk"; Erich Carle, JK Rowling, fairy tales, just about anything suitable to read to six year olds. She has no business in the classroom, period!!!
Ridiculous!!
Yes, it is. So is the Song of Solomon.
I think this is a fun, tempest in a teapot issue about contemporary Christians and their conceited heresies...
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Santa Claus is a cultural persona...
Santa is a phantasm. Who is prince of phantasms in the Bible? Beelzebub.
Consider the words: fan (fanatici), fantasy (phantasien), fantastical, fanatical, fantasia, phantom, phantasm, phantasmal, phantasmagoric, etc.; with their etymological and definitive relations to each other.
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fairy tales
That term caught my eye...
Thomas Hobbes...
Part IV. Of the Kingdom of Darkness
Chap. xlvii. Of the Benefit that proceedeth from such Darkness
“...the kingdom of fairies (that is, to the old wives' fables in England, concerning ghosts and spirits and the feats they play in the night).”
“The fairies, in whatever nation they converse, have but one universal king, which some poets of ours call King Oberon; but the Scripture calls Beelzebub, prince of demons.”
“The fairies and ghosts inhabit darkness, solitudes, and graves.”
“The fairies also have their enchanted castles and certain gigantic ghosts that domineer over the regions round about them.
“The fairies cannot be seized and brought to answer for the hurt they do.”