GRINCH LIVES IN MYERSTOWN, PENNSYLVANIA

She teaches in Lickdale. At least she did until last week. Now she might want to think about hiding in her basement.

Theresa Farrisi is the Grinch. The Lebanon Daily News has proof:

One of Farrisi's assignments was to read Clement C. Moore’s famous poem, “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” to a first-grade class at Lickdale Elementary School.

“The poem has great literary value, but it goes against my conscience to teach something which I know to be false to children, who are impressionable,” said Farrisi, 43. “It’s a story. I taught it as a story. There’s no real person called Santa Claus living at the North Pole.”

Farrisi doesn’t believe in Santa Claus, and she doesn’t think anyone else should, either. She made her feelings clear to the classroom full of 6- and 7-year-olds, some of whom went home crying.

Schaeffer got off the school bus later that day, dragging her backpack in the mud, tears in her angry little eyes.

“She yelled at me, ‘Why did you lie?’” recalled Jamey’s mother, Elizabeth. “‘Why didn’t you tell me Santa Claus died?’”

Farrisi -- a substitute music teacher -- lamely told the newspaper that she "did not tell the students Santa Claus was dead. I said there was a man named Nickolas of Myrna who died in 343 A.D., upon whom the Santa Claus myth (is based).”

Well, glad she settled that confusion.