religious privilege

i often do diversity trainings and use social justice as the foundation of my trainings. a few weeks ago, i led a training on religious privilege. it was only an hour long session; aimed at getting people to talk about how religious privilege affects and impacts all our lives.
the group was certainly slow to talk with one another and i attempted to roll at their pace. talking about religion over lunch is, afterall, a little unusual and potentially scary. i gave that to them. so i am nearing the 45 minute mark--we still needed to verbalize concrete examples of religious privilege. i pulled out my old stand-by, the academic year vacation schedule. christmas break and easter break, now of course, politically corrected to be winter and spring break respectively. from no where i expected came an absurd PLE! our vacation schedule is based on the farming season. that's why we have winter break. logical, perfectly. accurate, debatable.
first, i was blown out of the water and stumped with this response. it made me a little disappointed; disappointed for a few reasons actually. i was disappointed in myself because i wasn't prepared for this answer. i was disappointed in the answer itself because it blocked that person and the rest of the group from having a dialogue about religious privilege. and, i was disappointed because at the end when i asked the group for something new they took from the session, the first few answers were that our vacation breaks were based on the farming season.
why is it that what people who came took away something that wasn't even about the topic? this PLE totally took center stage to the potential learning and exploring that could have happened.
i do want to say that yes, we still farm in this country. however, we are an industrialized, technology-driven country and society. we have been for a long time. if our vacations were in fact determined from farming, why isn't farming a greater part of our current culture? i still believe that religion is the greater determinant of why we center our annual vacation breaks around december 25 and easter sunday.

when i was younger, the holidays i celebrated were not given as school holidays. that continues to be the case even now with the changed language of what our vacations are called. i always had christmas and easter off, including the week around each of those holidays. in order to take the two holidays celebrated in my non-christian religion, my mom had to lie. taking holidays that were not christian, and therefore not already blocked out in the academic year, was unacceptable. how is it that to practice religion in a country that grants freedom of religion is unacceptable? all i knew as a kid was that my holiday, my religion was not valid enough for the school system. being "sick" was valid, even without a cough, headache, illness, or symptoms of illness. so, on holidays--just two days in the whole year, i was called in sick. yet, no one had to be sick to get christmas off.

that PLE just took away my experience...i think that's why it took me by such surprise.