This is Water: Rethinking Holiday Traditions
Can a gratitude based holiday tradition include gifts?
The other day I was cooking at the stove with Alice in her little crib-like "helper" stand I keep next to the counter. As I often do, I leafed through mail while the food was heating. I flipped through a museum store catalog, narrating the pages for Alice.
"This might be nice for Grandma and Grandpa or Christmas," I said, pointing to a large gift basket. "I think they'd like that."
Cody and I have been talking a lot about what kinds of holiday traditions we want to nurture for Alice. A Christmas day walk, a real tree cut from our forest, a special holiday meal, an advent calendar, and gifts on Christmas morning. That last one, though, gave me a bit of pause. As an adult, I have always enjoyed the challenge of finding unique gifts for family and friends, gifts that speak to what I know about them or our relationship. Something special they wouldn't buy for themselves.
As a child, it was different. Christmas was, to me, centered around presents — my presents, specifically, the ones I longed for in the inky pages of the Sears toy catalog. This wasn't some particular choice of my family, it was how it was everywhere — the explosive excitement from November to the end of December hung in the air in school, in church, and on television in the form of endless commercials for that year's most popular toys. Christmas was, de facto, the stuff you got. And I absorbed it as everyone does.
For most children I think there was always some degree of disappointment with what was received — either you didn't get something you wanted, or you got it and it wasn't as fun or exciting as you'd hoped. The toy you thought would be like it was in the commercial, and it wasn't. The video game that didn't work. A knockoff, or a duplicate of something you already had. There was always that blue tinge of sadness after Christmas, no matter how many packages were under the tree.
This is not to say that my parents didn't create wonderful and memorable traditions — they did. And it wasn't their fault I was so obsessed with toys — that experience is nearly universal, at least in this part of the world. And of course there were those families who tried hard to reduce or even eliminate gift giving as a significant part of the holidays. (The cringe-worthy phrase 'presence, not presents' comes to mind.) But as I stood at my counter with that catalog in my hands, I asked myself a curious question:
"Why do children not have any involvement in gift giving at Christmas?"
I had never really thought about this before, but in all my memories of Christmas as a young child, gifts were something that you got, not something we gave to other people. I suppose it’s to preserve the Santa Claus mythos. I’ve never cared for the that whole side of Christmas because of — unpopular opinion alert! — the inherent dishonesty, however fanciful. But looking past that, it's objectively a very self-centered frame for a holiday that's supposed to be about giving. Santa is a supernatural gift giver who summons things for you out of thin air. How can families cultivate traditions that emphasize gratitude and generosity when a child's entire experience is designed around the magical receipt of gifts, that are due to no one's effort (except maybe their own, if the family leans on the idea that gifts are for "good little boys and girls" only)? And why hadn't I questioned any of this until now?
And I heard in my head, "Because this is water."
Fifteen or so years ago I read the speech David Foster Wallace delivered at Kenyon College's commencement ceremony. In it, he uses a joke about fish being unaware that they are living in water as an analogy for going through life without an awareness of your own automatic ways of thinking and looking at the world. (It's an essay worth reading for yourself, when you have time). It must have stuck with me, that essay, given that the phrase came back to me so easily, so many years later.
And so, I will follow Wallace's advice, and try to think beyond the frame of choices I have been given. I love giving gifts, and I love that part of Christmas — I don't want to abandon that tradition because it can become fraught with greed. So instead I talk to Alice, and tell her about the surprises we can get for our family. I explain how Christmas is about doing those things for the people we love. I tell her about the year Daddy was so sad because his antique wax flowers melted in the sun, so for his birthday I got a copy of it made, out of shells, so it would never melt again. How I cried when, on my birthday, Daddy got us all permission to go on my favorite hiking trail that was no longer open to the public. Or how this fall I stayed up late to bake my father a pie, his favorite treat, from apples on our own land.
I may not always succeed in trying to do things our own way. The water is around us, after all. But we can still try to see it, and aim to do better.
I look forward to Alice proudly spreading Santa-truths in a few years... I'm sure she'll use her power wisely...
Your thoughts around this resonate so much with me. I vividly remember my sister and I sitting down for entire afternoons with the Sears catalog (the "Wish Book" I believe it was called), making our lists and daydreaming, but even then having an understanding of which toys were too expensive or too fancy or somehow otherwise out of our league. As a counterbalance, one of my other most vivid and happy Christmas memories is shopping at the "Santa's Secret Shop" that our elementary school's PTA always put on, in which kids got to go shopping and select our own gifts for our parents, siblings and other family members. Those "shops" were populated entirely with stuff from the dollar store and from what I can recall, our gifts choices were always pretty weird and/or generic, BUT I truly remember the joy of picking things out for people and the excitement of having something to give. I love the approach you're taking with Alice. So that she knows gifts are not an obligation or a measure of her worth, but an act of love and service to celebrate the people we care about. I know her Christmas memories will be truly magical, wishing your family a beautiful season.