When I was little, I used to love Christmas. On Christmas morning I would wake up and creep out to the Christmas tree to get a look at the presents. Look at this big one! What’s in THAT one? It’s shaped like a bull horn. What could it be? And look! This one sounds like it’s full of pebbles. Shake it again and listen! Oh! That one in the corner! Who is THAT for? Maybe it’s a poster of Kirk Cameron for me!
I would jump on my parent’s bed and beg them to get up, get up, pleeeeease get up, so we could start opening presents. But it was never that easy.
In my family, Christmas morning was highly ritualized. We didn’t open presents until everyone was awake, then we had to have breakfast together (Butterscotch oatmeal, breakfast sausage, coffee cake and apple juice) and then finally, finally, Lord have MERCY, it was time to open gifts. But wait. There was an order. Youngest to oldest. And in a foster family, I was never the youngest. So I waited and waited and waited. Then it was finally my turn, and I got to open a present. One present. Then, it was someone else’s turn, and we all watched and ooooed and aaahhed over their present and then it was someone’ ELSE’s turn, and in a family with seven kids there are a lot of someone else’s turns. It took several hours to open presents in my family. We laughed a lot, often until we had tears in our eyes. We gave weird gifts. Boxes of rocks that symbolized something or other. Gag gifts, certificates good for our services, homemade do-dads and if you were unlucky (or a grown up), socks.
Years later, as I look at my own kids, I wonder about what kinds of family traditions I want to start.
I’ll start with this. Chris and I are… different. Weird, maybe. Fine. But we are also happy and trying to live our values. This year, as in many years past, we declared we would give home made gifts to everyone. We thought about the different people on our lists, wondered about what would suit them and earnestly tried to create something they would appreciate. In years past we have said this, right up until two days before Christmas, and then have frantically looked at each other and gone out and spent more money than we had, on things no one really wanted, made across the world by people we would never meet, who could never afford to buy what they were making, because whatever we had made for people wasn’t good enough.
Despite the fact that we put thought and time and effort into it, it wasn’t good enough, and the only way it would truly be good enough is if it had a label, and if that label said Eddie Bauer. At the end of the holiday season, we would collapse into a consumeristic coma, fat and bloated with credit card debt and miserable because we had let ourselves down, once again.
This year, we said, this year, would be different. We would make homemade gifts. We would stand by our values. We would just have to toughen up and tell folks that to us Christmas is about giving to others in whatever form is meaningful and not expecting anything in return. Yes indeedy, this year would be the year.
And it was.
And it was a huge failure.
We watched hopefully as family members opened our homemade gifts and barely managed a nod in recognition. A quiet mumble of thanks as they set it down and went on to the next box in their pile. And despite the fact that we said we wouldn’t let it get to us, and we knew this would happen, it didn’t make it easy when it did happen, and it did get to us.
See, here’s the thing. We are a single income family. That single income comes from a part time job at a nonprofit organization. Suffice to say, we do not live lavishly. And that’s o.k.
Yes, really.
We live simply. We live happily and we live frugally. We choose to do this because we want to spend our free time together. Because we do not feel an urge to fill our house with stuff in order to be happy, and because generally that stuff comes shipped from China with loads of lead based paint and phthalates and other gross stuff we don’t want in our house, anyway. We go for walks and read books together and this is the stuff that makes our world go round.
And then there is Christmas. At Christmas we get gift giving anxiety. We get gift giving anxiety because we don’t have the money to buy everyone on our list “real” presents.
But.
But, even if we did, we wouldn’t. Because that is not us.
Eddie Bauer does not need our Benjamin Franklins, but Aldo Leopold and the Foundation created in his legacy, does. I simply can’t abide going to the mall to show my loved ones what they mean to me. It hurts my wallet, yes, but it also hurts my heart. I would take a plate of homemade cookies over a store bought sweater set in a heartbeat.
In the morning, Jay will wake up and experience Christmas morning. It is up to me shape that tradition. To shape his worldview. What will he think is important? We will probably continue to give people home made gifts for Christmas, because to us, that is important. I hope others will understand that beyond our frugality, beyond our environmentalism, we are working to influence our kids. We are working to teach them that a Merry Christmas is not made in a factory and Santa’s elves do not mass produce crewneck t-shirts for the Gap.
When I was a kid, I loved Christmas. But when I look back on it, I didn’t love Christmas because of all the presents I got. Those were soon forgotten. The best part was the togetherness. The opening of gifts, one by one, as we all sat around and laughed and talked. It would take us hours to open our presents each year, and though I thought at the time the presents were the main attraction, I can see now that they weren’t. The main attraction was the togetherness, the opening of zany, creative, often wild and weird presents that each had a story.
Living within our means is a year round tradition, and so is living our values, and this is the kind of tradition I want to carry on with my kids.
Merry Christmas, everyone. May the spirit of the season be with you.
No comments:
Post a Comment