Thinking hard about Christmas, faith and Santa

This is a hard post to write, because it is me looking hard at myself, seeing where I have fallen short and owning up to it. It is about religion -- what I believe about it -- so if you are not a fan, feel free to skip this post.

Yesterday the kids were looking at a photo of themselves from last year. Michelle had it taken while we were at work, as a surprise gift to us. It's of them with Santa Claus, looking miserable as can be (but still cute). They didn't get the whole Santa thing at 1-and-a -half, and they only sorta get it now.

So, sitting in front of our Christmas tree, I decided to explain.

I showed them YouTube videos of Santa in his sleigh, dropping brightly-wrapped gifts off for good little boys and girls. I taught them the "Santa Claus is coming to town" song. I laughed when Dean told a whining, crying Cary: "Stop it that noise, Cary! Santa Claus won't bring you any presents!"

I thought it was all so cute, I told that story to Lester after the kids went to bed.

And my wise husband said, "Hmmm. I wonder if we should have talked to them about the real meaning of Christmas first before introducing the Santa/presents concept." He said it in a very non-judgmental way, like he was really just thinking of it for the first time.

I stopped in my tracks, realizing that he was right. I -- we -- screwed up big time. He thought of it for the first time last night, but *I* hadn't thought of it at all. Ugh. Ugh. And oy!

I know that we can still go back and talk to them about Jesus, and help them understand on a 2-year-old's level how the two things (sorta) go together. So it's not like all is lost. I know that.

But I'm disappointed in myself.

As long as Lester and I have been dating seriously, we've consistently said that we wanted to make sure our kids had a good sense of God in our lives and theirs.  But ever since Lester and I stopped going to our old church, we have been woefully delinquent in that department. We haven't taught the boys about praying (except for at night and sporadically before meals); we haven't read the Bible (save a few kids' Bible stories). We haven't talked to them about God in any clear and consistent way. Worse, we haven't shown them by example that we intend to live our lives with God at the center.

And now that Christmas is here -- a perfect time to talk about religious traditions and what they mean and why -- I went straight for the secular.

I'm not even one who thinks that you *have* to go to church to be a person who has a heart for God.
But for us, it seems that without the accountability of a church home and family, we slowly have let our faith lapse. That worries me on so many levels.

Without going into private details, I'll just say that coming from a family where I think Mom and Dad did so many things right, except that, I have a heightened sense of anxiety about what can happen to a family where there's no sense that you have a purpose on this Earth other than to serve yourself.

So I have to do better. We have to do better. Whether we find a church home or not, there's no reason not to at least talk to our kids seriously about what we say we believe and value.

This is incredibly important to our family. And we just can't make any more excuses.

Compromising Christmas

Holiday dilemma:

I grew up in a household that had HUGE Christmases.
-Big, live tree, decorated within an inch of its life.
-Gazillions of presents big and small for all five of us siblings, plus cousins, nieces, nephews, aunts, uncles, Grands, and friends of the family.
-Lots of decorations all around the house. It was kinda insane.
-Christmas cards sent to a hundred thousand people - and received from twice that many.
-Christmas music blaring in the house and in the car.
-Christmas dinners; Christmas cookies. Christmas fudge. Christmas weight gain.

But Lester grew up in a household where his mother -- a single woman who worked 6 days a week, sometimes 7 -- could afford just one big gift for her only child and one small gift. And that was during good years. There was plenty of warmth in his house because the two of them were best friends, and there was no shortage of love. But glitter and tinsel and fudge and credit card debt and singing Christmas cards? No. Not by a longshot.

I LOVED my Christmases growing up and can still vividly feel the warmth and emotion and excitement the holiday brought. But I can also see how there was way too much of an emphasis on demanding and getting lots of gifts, giving lots of gifts to others, and spending way too much money. And when I see the ritual repeated nowadays with my siblings' kids, I can really see just how ungrateful it makes them. They open one thing, toss it to the side and dive in to the pile for something else. When they run out of things to open, they pout. They count who has "the most" gifts and have temper tantrums if they feel slighted in any way. They trash their toys and leave a mess for the adults to clean up. By the day after Christmas, they're over the entire thing.

Meanwhile, Lester didn't exactly LOVE his super-sparse Christmases, but he definitely feels like he was much more appreciative of what his Mom was able to do each year, and is a more grateful and less materially-needy person now. (Except for shoes. That man loves shoes.) He's witnessed the carnage that occurs on Christmas Day with my siblings' kids and his takeaway is that he didn't miss much growing up, if that's the way it was for us.

So...now that we have our own kids, how do we combine the best parts of both our memories of and lessons-learned from Christmas?

This is a tough one.

Neither one of us wants to raise ungrateful, spoiled-brat, gimme-gimme, little "Me!-Me!-Me!" kids. But we differ on how to make sure we don't do that.

Lester wants us to go the one-big-gift, one-small-gift route. I appreciate the sentiment, but it still seems awfully austere to me. (Yes, I know this is the Davis Family Year of Austerity. But it's Christmas, good grief.)

I have 6 or 7 developmental toys I want to get the boys and some things to decorate and populate their new, bigger room. But I realize that it is silly to buy 18-month-olds a bunch of stuff to open on Christmas. So I don't know what to do. I'm really torn. I WANT them to have those toys and things for their new room. I DON'T want to start a tradition of three kids getting a glut of crap on Christmas.

This year, we're already eschewing the live tree ( a major part of Christmas to me) -- only because we have no confidence that the two rascals who live in our house won't pull all the ornaments off and try to climb up the tree, or splash in the water in the tree base, or yank on the light-strings, or tear open the presents that are there for other family members. In other words, just be general pains-in-the-neck the entire time the tree is up.

We're putting up a smallish, artificial, pre-lighted tree that is usually for decorating the back end of the house. This way, we can put it up on something where they can't reach it and still have at least something of a tree to speak of. But it's an artificial tree. It's small. It's not the same. (Waaaah!)

We're not sending Christmas cards. We're only buying gifts for children this year. I'll try to decorate the house some, but floor decorations are out this year (see our issue with putting up a live tree) so I'm limited there, too.

We certainly aren't going to Christmas Eve services with Cary and Dean anytime soon. At least not until they stop turning into the Grinch Jr. and Ebenezer Scrooge in miniature when they're overly tired.

So even CHURCH is getting left out of this Christmas. Bah humbug.

I'm feeling a little blue about all the minimalism, or maybe just a little underwhelmed.

I'm hoping that this is just a temporary, toned-down way of celebrating Christmas, until our boys are a bit older and we're finished with the Year (or Years) of Austerity. And I know that in some ways, things will pick up when those two things happen, especially when it comes to decorating and baking cookies and going to Tree of Lights festivals and watching "A Charlie Brown Christmas" together as a family and all that stuff that is so much a part of the holiday.

But I'm not sure where we'll end up even then when it comes to merging our very different ideas about the gift-giving part of our holiday traditions.

We're usually good about coming to a meeting of the minds about things. Let's pray this issue will be no different.