A CELEBRATION OF DIFFERENCES : Programs to acquaint children with a range of holiday and religious customs are being introduced in the schools.

At St. Michael & All Angels Parish Day School in Studio City, it’s “Hanukkah chapel” time.

The students who attend the Episcopal elementary school come to hear the rabbi from Harvard-West lake School next door discuss the Jewish Festival of Lights. Rabbi Jacqueline Ellenson, a chaplain at Harvard-Westlake, lights a menorah, and a group of children sing a Hanukkah song.

Hanukkah chapel is just one facet of the school’s cross-cultural program, which includes an international holiday music program and cooking workshops based on the foods of many cultures, says Barbara Card, resource teacher at the school.

Programs designed to acquaint children with a range of holiday and religious celebrations are widely being introduced in public, private and parochial schools.

At Westminster Presbyterian Pre-School in Westlake Village, children spend time making Hanukkah decorations and learning songs and stories about the holiday.

At Vaughn Street School in Pacoima, which has only minority students, Principal Yvonne Chan says students learn to dance the hora, an Israeli circle dance, and study the basics of holidays as they are celebrated around the world. At Reseda Baptist School, this is the first year that children in the pre-kindergarten class are making crafts symbolic of Hanukkah, says Margy Platt, director of the preschool.

Even the number of cross-cultural holiday books available has risen steeply in the last few years. According to Darlene Daniel, owner of Pages, a children’s bookstore in Tarzana, there has been an almost 20-fold increase in the number of Hanukkah titles available compared to five years ago. The store now carries more than 60 different Hanukkah books, and many about Christmas and Kwanzaa--the Dec. 26 African-American holiday based on the traditional African harvest festival--as well as records and audiotapes focusing on all the holidays.

Some parents say the schools’ cross-cultural approach to the holidays helps children deal more easily with the great variety of religions and cultures represented in the San Fernando Valley community.

Some say the benefits are personal.

For Wendy Beiser, who was raised as a member of St. Michael’s and later married a man who was brought up a Jew, the cross-cultural approach taken by St. Michael’s helps her family deal with their need to embrace both religions openly, she says. “My husband was a little uneasy about sending our daughter to an Episcopal school,” she says, “because we didn’t want our daughter, Ashley, to be confused with mixed messages between home and school. But the school is very, very open and invites everyone to share their holiday.”

Ashley Beiser, a 6-year-old first-grader, recently came home from school and told her parents that they should know that the children are singing the name Jesus in a song. Beiser says that sort of comment shows that Ashley is aware that her family has its own personal perspective on the holidays. Beiser, who is active in the parents’ club at the school, says families who are strictly Christian say they are happy their children are exposed to many cultures.

James Goss, professor and chairman of the Department of Religious Studies at Cal State Northridge, says schools “can’t start too early in teaching that there are differences and that those differences don’t mean we have to give up our own religious beliefs.”

Goss says a 196S. Supreme Court decision--”Abbingdon School District vs. Schempp”--found that while states could not require the practice of religion in the public schools, knowledge about religions is necessary to a complete education.

“We live in a world where religious groups don’t have to be isolated from each other,” he says “And learning about the religious practices of others helps you understand your own faith better.”

Goss says participating in religious celebrations, while not an academic lesson in the faith, offers children a positive association that can help them to delve deeper as they mature. Letting children experience stories, music and crafts, he says, is a good way to help them catch the spirit or mood of the religion, which, he adds, is more important than any explicit teaching.

He says, too, that just participating in some of the festivities of another religion may help children overcome fears of misunderstandings. “Holidays are a time when cultures can become accessible,” Goss says. “You can literally taste the culture.”

At the preschool level, children seem to be natural party animals and appreciate the general joy of the celebration, says Judy Jacobsen, director of Westminster Presbyterian Church Pre-School Nursery. “One little girl in our school came home after hearing stories about all the celebrations and asked her parents, ‘What do we celebrate?’ ” Jacobsen says.

Some parents, she says, seem surprised at first when their children bring home a glued and glittered six-pointed Jewish star during Advent. “I explain that we do have a number of Jewish families that attend our school and that we are trying to create a better understanding of all people,” Jacobsen says. “Most parents are very pleased.”

Some schools are more cautious about discussing a broad range of cultures, and some believe that their mission is more to emphasize the children’s own religious beliefs.

Betsy Brown Braun, director of the Stephen S. Weiss Nursery School in Los Angeles, says the school’s holiday focus is entirely on Hanukkah. “This is because the backbone of our curriculum is Judaica,” she says. “We do have a few families enrolled in the school who celebrate Christmas. If a child brings up Christmas, we allow the discussion to go on, but we don’t bring it up ourselves.”

The focus is not on avoiding Christmas, Braun says, but rather on exposing children to the joys of Hanukkah. “We like to discuss what they are, not what they are not,” she says.

At the Harold M. Schulweis Valley Beth Shalom Day School in Encino, families of all students must be members of the temple for the children to qualify for admission, says Joyce Black, curriculum director. She says the school doesn’t emphasize Hanukkah--”We have the children play some dreidel games”--because it is not an important holiday in the Jewish religion.

“We do talk a bit about Christmas, how and why it is celebrated. We emphasize that we respect all celebrations,” she says.

But Black says the tough task in the day school is to help students deal with the fact that Christmas is the mainstream holiday. “Our thrust is to help the children and the parents deal with the fact that there are Christmas trees all around,” she says.

Some educators express concern that the interest in cross-cultural appreciation of the holidays needs to go far deeper than songs and cookies.

“The celebration of differences cannot and should not be limited to the holidays,” says Margo Long, principal of Oakwood Elementary School in North Hollywood.

Long says that at the school’s recent parents meeting, one Buddhist family told the group that their daughter was feeling uncomfortable and thought that she was the only Buddhist student enrolled.

Long says she invited the family to teach the class about their religion. “That is empowering to the child, to have an identity, and it helps people learn to be comfortable with who they are,” she says.

At Oakwood’s secondary school, students have formed a cultural awareness association that discusses racism and related issues, sponsors guest speakers, and works with schools in the community and in the inner city to bridge cultural barriers and get discussion going, says Bridget Anderson, an administrator and counselor.

Long says that while studying the Middle Ages, the fifth-grade students at Oakwood take a two-day field trip to a monastery. “They talk with the monks, they discuss how monastic life today compares to such a life hundreds of years ago and they attend six services in the two days with the monks,” she says.

“This deals with religion at a much deeper level than Christmas cookies,” she says.