Christmas

Always Be Yourself. Unless You Can Be Santa; Then Be Santa

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 5 Comments

How can anyone dislike Santa Claus? However, my relationship with him as an adult is a bit ambiguous. While I hate lying, I’m a storyteller at heart. I hate the modern-day commercialism around Santa Claus, but love the magic of the toymaker myth. So I thought I was going to have a lot of heartache about how to treat Santa Claus when Sprout got old enough to understand him. But I think I’ve come upon an approach that makes sense – emphasizing the idea of Santa Claus as a character rather than an actual person.

Always Be Yourself. Unless You Can Be Santa; Then Be Santa-2

It certainly helps that Sprout is the most familiar with Santa as a character rather than a real person. We already read about Santa in books, from ones as simple as Biscuit’s Pet and Play Christmas to as weird as Lemony Snicket’s The Lump of Coal. The un-reality of Santa is emphasized even more by the fact that Santa isn’t even human in all of the books – in Pete the Cat Saves Christmas, he’s a cat, and Merry Christmas, Ollie! features Father Christmas Goose.

Through these stories, we can talk about whatever parts of Santa we want to, instead of the dominant cultural version. We’ll emphasize the idea of Santa as a generous toy giver who brings gifts because he loves people, just as we give each other gifts because we love each other. (And to tie to the actual religious part of Christmas, because people loved Jesus and brought gifts to him.) We won’t touch the “good girls and boys” nonsense with a ten foot pole because I’m already ideologically opposed to using toys as rewards.

Now, distinguishing between a character and a real person sounds terribly naive when talking to a two-year-old. But while little kids have difficulty distinguishing between fantasy and reality, it doesn’t mean that they’re incapable of it. Contrary to 1960s British “moral campaigner” Mary Whitehouse’s position, kids back then did not actually believe that Tom Baker (then playing the Doctor in Doctor Who) was actually drowning for the entire week between a cliffhanger and resolution. Even Sprout, who is only two, knows that characters in books are not “real.”

So when it comes time for him to find out that Santa isn’t a “real” person, I hope that this approach allows us to acknowledge the fundamental fiction of Santa while maintaining the magic and spirit. An excellent book for doing this, which is also had the most heart-breaking first chapter of anything I’ve ever read, is The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, by Julie Lane. (There’s a couple of other books of that name, but this is the best, obviously.) The beautiful part of it is that it roots Santa Claus and the traditions associated with him in tragic, beautiful, real world (albeit still fictional) circumstances while maintaining a little of the mystery.

Besides “Santa as story,” I think it’s also important when the time comes to provide some explanation as to why we’ve been pretending to be Santa this whole time. Fortunately, even that’s rooted in an idea that Sprout understands – cosplay! Because of our foray into costuming for Baltimore Comic Con, he already understands that sometimes adults wear costumes and pretend to be characters because it’s fun. Clearly, people dress as Santa because everyone wants to be him. People dressed as Batman or Groot aren’t actually Batman or Groot, but it’s fun to pretend we are. And who wouldn’t want to be Santa? He gets to give out presents, eat cookies, ride on a sled pulled by flying reindeer, and only works for a month a year (I assume production at the North Pole starts in late November).

No matter how we get there, I want to teach Sprout that we are all Santa for each other. While there’s no single jolly old man in red dropping off presents, we can act in that spirit by giving each other gifts and reaching out to those in need. Instead of Christmas becoming an orgy of consumer receiving, we want to frame it as a gentle season of generosity. And if I can teach him that, the magic of Santa will always be in his life.

Halfway through the Dark – Traveling Home for Christmas

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 3 Comments

In the midst of winter, we rage against the darkness with as much love and joy as we can muster, celebrating with family and friends. I celebrate Christmas, but it is only one holiday among many, whether it is New Years, Solstice, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or earlier in autumn, Diwali. We prepare ourselves for the coming cold by surrounding ourselves with light. This year, our family was so fortunate to be surrounded with love, even when we stumbled a bit.

Unlike many families, Chris and I never had to worry about sharing Christmas between two sets of parents. As we were high school sweethearts, our parents still live four miles apart. For the past several years, we’ve actually done a joint holiday, where we open presents separately at each house in the morning and then all have dinner together. This year, we stayed at Chris’ parents house for the whole week, along with his sister and brother-in-law.

But unlike previous years, we had a toddler. While Sprout was in our midst last Christmas, he was barely sitting up, much less mobile. He required constant supervision, but at least stayed where you put him. Last Christmas Day, we were able to prop him up in a laundry basket while he looked adorable in his little Santa pajamas. This year, he was everywhere all at once all of the time. Between the relatives and an endless parade of guests (Christmas Eve, Christmas dinner, the day after Christmas), plus the tree and decorations, there was a palable sense of excitement. Needless to say, there was none of his normal interest in sitting quietly by himself flipping through a book.

Adding to this chaos was a number of non-human friends. My sister and brother-in-law brought their schauzer puppy, Jasper, who is about half Sprout’s size. They became fast friends. Sprout would slowly pet him on the back saying, “Niiiice” in a tone that my sister-in-law likened to Borat. While he did become bolder over time, I was proud of how gentle and kind Sprout was to Jasper. Occasionally the constant petting became a bit much, but in general Jasper was very tolerant and enjoyed Sprout’s company. One of them was almost always following the other around. When I took Sprout over to my parents’ house, Jasper was genuinely excited when he returned. He was even protective of Sprout, barking when he thought he was doing something dangerous.

The other non-human friends were a bit more – mechanical. My mother-in-law loves singing animatronic Christmas decorations. In addition to her “people” (little synchronized carolers), a singing stuffed Santa, a set of Disney characters playing instruments, and a penguin, she bought Sprout a singing Christmas tree that was about half his height. To the tune of Rocking Around the Christmas Tree, it bounced, its mouth moved, and its little lights blinked. It was cute the first few times. On repeat number 10, it became intensely grating, especially when Sprout turned on all of the singing creatures simultaneously. It also bothered me that they mesmerized Sprout even more than TV. We hoped Jasper would attack them and force a retreat, but he seemed to enjoy them as well. Which meant the rest of us either had to tolerate the same recorded songs over and over and over again or whining that we hid the toys on him. We settled on some combination of the two, along with a heavy dose of distraction. Even my mother-in-law became sick of them eventually – it took a toddler for her to realize that someone could love her “people” even more than she did.

While Sprout was wonderfully careful around the dog and fragile decorations, we started to see some of the fabled toddler defiance emerging. He began saying “No!” with a snotty edge in his voice and a pout. He degenerated into mini-meltdowns a few times, both conveniently in public, at restaurants. Thankfully, getting away from the table helped calm him down significantly. I know that won’t always work in the future, so I’m working on my bag of tricks, including deep breathing (for him and me).

I couldn’t blame him for being on a bit of an emotional roller-coaster – everything was so confusing. After an absolutely bonkers December with the first two weeks spent traveling, we bopped from house to house several times over the course of the week. On the way there and back, we slept over at my aunt’s house. Once we were in upstate New York, we spent half of the time at my in-laws and half the time at my parents’ houses. And we weren’t alone in those places. As Sprout is starting to be afraid of strangers, the crowd of unfamiliar extended family and friends must have been disorienting. Considering how much was new and overstimulating, he did extremely well.

With all of the other thrills, he wasn’t that excited by Christmas Day. He’s too young to enjoy anticipation, so unwrapping presents confused him. His very first present was a Little Tykes slide and once he saw that, he wasn’t interested in sitting still enough to open anything else. To him, the wrapped presents were just fancy boxes.

Eventually, he did open them all with a bit of help. I wouldn’t say otherwise (of course), but I was extremely pleased with what everyone got him. While I wrote a list, I knew folks were going to buy items that weren’t listed. Fortunately, all of our relatives stuck to giving the types of toys we value – active, creative, practical, durable, and not electronic.

Chris and I chose to make the trek up to the great, cold north so that we can spend it with our family and old friends. It was worth every mile.

Why I Will Never Buy Elf on the Shelf

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 12 Comments

The Elf on the Shelf is more than just an annoyance – it also promotes a lot of terrible values. Here’s why I will never buy Elf on the Shelf. 

Why I Will Never Buy Elf on the Shelf (Photo: Picture of the Elf on the Shelf with a No Sign Through It)

Wandering the bookstore in December, looking for gifts, I really hope that my four-year-old doesn’t notice – or at least doesn’t care about – the Elf on the Shelf prominently displayed by the check-out counter. While I know it’s a beloved tradition in many families, I kind of hate the thing. Besides its aesthetics, it stands for a bunch of values that are the opposite of what I want to teach my kids.

For those who have had the good fortune of avoiding the Elf on the Shelf, it’s stuffed elf that comes with a book. The main idea is that the Elf is a spy for Santa who watches the kids all day and reports back every night. Each morning, the parent puts the Elf in a different place, some of which involve increasingly complicated scenarios. While I normally love toys that come with books, the only thing the Elf on the Shelf is good for is these hilarious photos that reveal the Elf in some very compromised situations.

Here’s why I will never buy the Elf on the Shelf:

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The Best Ethically-Made Toys for Your Holiday Gifts

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 12 Comments

Ethically-made toys can be challenging to find, but these companies make toys in an ethical manner. 

The Best Ethically-Made Toys for Your Holiday Gifts (Photo: Toy fire truck, pounding hammer toy, stuffed raccoon, green wooden toy car)

Browsing the internet and flipping through catalogs, I sigh and frown. I wonder if the toys I’m buying my kids for Christmas won’t just make them happy, but will also do good in the world. While I want them to enjoy them, I don’t want their toys to cause toxic pollution or be made by people who are underpaid and treated poorly.

Ideally, I’d love to buy perfectly ethically-made toys, with workers paid well in safe conditions, materials that are sourced in environmentally-friendly ways, and production that supports local economies. Of course, I also want them to be high quality, encourage creative play, and be usable over a long period of time.

While there’s no such thing as a perfect product, the companies that produce these ethically-made toys get about as close as possible. This post is not sponsored and I do not have affiliate links with these companies. I just personally like them and want to encourage ethical shopping.

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Home for the Holidays

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 2 Comments

We had a wonderful first Christmas with Sprout at both of our parents’ houses, full of warmth, good food, family togetherness, and presents. His favorite part appeared to be ripping apart the wrapping paper, although he preferred to eat it than notice what was inside the boxes. He also enjoyed both sets of his grandparents fawning over him, staring at the glittering Christmas trees, and grabbing at my mother-in-law’s animatronic, waddling Charlie Brown toy. Even if he didn’t get enough presents to spoil multiple children, he’d still be so blessed by the number of people who love him. Of course, that means Chris and I are as well, for which we are very thankful.

We also had the good fortune of being able to attend the wedding of my sister-in-law and her new husband. There’s nothing more wonderful than being able to welcome someone you love into the family!

Unfortunately, I think this next week might be a bit of a let-down for Sprout, as there will no longer be relatives endlessly eager to entertain him or sparkly lights. New Years is going to be a very low-key affair for us – we’ve never had anyone look after him who isn’t directly related to us and it’s certainly too late to find a babysitter. But I’m not going to complain about a nice, chill day off.

How were your holidays, whether you celebrated Christmas or not? What do you look forward to for the New Year?

A Child Shivers in the Cold

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 5 Comments

There’s an old joke that posits if Three Wise Women visited baby Jesus, they would ask for directions and bring practical gifts. (Or as my friend Deb said earlier this week, “Let us bring him silver and gold? What were they thinking?”) While the joke plays off of harmful sexist stereotypes, it does have a grain of reality – most portrayals of the infant Jesus miss a fundamental truth. They capture his innocence, but completely ignore his inherent messiness.

As I learned from the very first day as a mom, babies are gross. They are beautiful and amazing and disgusting. They come into the world in a rush of blood and other bodily fluids. They poop early and often, if everything goes well. They are capable of spitting up the entire contents of their stomach and appear to enjoy demonstrating this skill. Beyond showing the wide range of bodily functions, newborns have almost zero motor control. They hit themselves in the face, they hit you in the face, they scratch you while nursing.

As I believe Jesus was fully and completely human, I also believe he was fully and completely baby. Beyond the fact that they made babies look like shrunken adults, medieval portraits don’t capture the chaos of being a new mother, even if it is of “Immanuel.” Even the more naturalistic ones of Mary nursing Jesus express only the peace that can come with that, not the struggle or frustration so many mothers experience. It’s clear that the men that painted these were never “Daddies” (even if they were fathers) or had a theology that excluded that perspective. In contrast, I prefer the painting on the front of the book 4 AM Madonnas, which my pastor kindly gave me as a gift. Mary looks exhausted and overwhelmed, while Jesus looks happy and ready to play at goodness knows what hour.

Besides aesthetics, this portrayal of Jesus sanitizes him and his story right from the beginning. It elevates him to someone inhuman, removing the parts of being a physical being that people prefer not to think about. This perspective also eliminates the role of Mary and Joseph as parents. It fails to acknowledge that someone had to change the Holy Diapers and get up with him in the middle of the night when he was teething. While my personal theology doesn’t emphasize Mary as much as some Catholic churches, I think the Protestant church gives her short shrift. Too often, we think of Jesus as having been born and then parenting himself. Acknowledging all of these aspects – especially the “unseemly” ones – is fundamental to connecting with Jesus in all of his human-God essence. If we deny those things in Jesus, we deny them in us as well.

Lastly, this attitude towards baby Jesus as a miniature version of Christ on the cross influences how we parent, both as individuals and as a society. Thankfully, most people don’t go so far as (major trigger warning on the link) the child abuse-level “discipline” that the Pearls advocate, but we too often expect children to act like small adults. It’s so easy to forget how much babies and kids have to learn about the world and how little perspective they have. During the times when I have been tired and frustrated because Sprout won’t fall asleep or just keeps crying, I have to remind myself – “He doesn’t know any better. He’s just a baby.”

If Christians can remember that even Jesus was a helpless, smelly, gross, amazing baby, perhaps we as parents and society can treat our own children more like we would treat him, shining in that manger. That would be a true Christmas celebration.

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If you are looking for somewhere to visit in the Advent season, I invite you to my church, which practices “radical welcome.” For other thoughts on Christmas, check out my Christmas post last year, which linked my religion and my passion for social justice.

Tis the Season for Family Traditions

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 5 Comments

Every family that celebrates Christmas has its own traditions. So far, Chris and I haven’t had much of a chance to create our own – he’s had to work during Christmas Day the last several years. Unfortunately, this isn’t going to be the year to set our own either.

One of the most beloved traditions of Chris’s family – or at least his dad – is “executing the tree” at a tree farm that shares his name. My father-in-law adores tromping out to the middle of nowhere (otherwise known as “west of Saratoga Springs, New York”), picking out, and cutting down his very own Christmas tree. Invariably, it is always brutally cold. And yet, they still have the annual pilgrimage. Of course, this year, Granddad wanted to bring his beloved grandson along over Thanksgiving break. What’s a family tradition if it doesn’t include the newest member of the family? Because I wanted to spend as much time as possible with both sides of the family, I also invited my parents along.

So we all piled on layer over layer of clothing and drove out to the boonies. We dressed Sprout in his brand-new snowsuit, which makes him look like a cross between the Michelin Man and the little brother in A Christmas Story. He gazed at us in puzzlement, wondering what this bizarre swaddle was. Between the suit, the fact that we stuffed him in the baby carrier (not his favorite), and the fact that it was the coldest weather he’s ever experienced, he was utterly befuddled. He wasn’t the only one – much of the time, my mom was wondering why she was there too. She enjoys spending time with my in-laws, but there’s a reason my parents stopped cutting down their own tree a decade ago. Fortunately, we caught the tractor-drawn wagon on the way back to the parking lot after cutting down the tree. After inching along to avoid falling on ice with my baby strapped to me, my back was quite relieved.

The best thing about the cold is getting out of it. Fortunately, the tree farm has a little lodge, where we drunk hot chocolate, ate grilled cheese, and listened to a guitarist sing James Taylor. It almost made stomping back and forth across the frozen earth worth it. Seeing the farm’s adorable snow-white reindeer was also a little magical.

If “executing the tree” is all about North Country-style stubbornness against the weather, my family’s big tradition was all about child-focused coziness. It was actually a whole bunch of traditions combined into one big one – the advent calendar. My mom – who is absurdly crafty – sewed me a frilly, red-and-green fabric advent calendar when I was a little girl. Starting on December 1, I would run downstairs every morning and pull a little piece of paper out of that day’s pocket. Each card had a little clue on it, teasing a different surprise each day, either an activity like seeing the Christmas lights in the park or a little present like a Christmas pencil. Pulling out that card was the highlight of my December days. On Christmas morning, I shuttled back and forth between the calendar and the kitchen, waiting for my dad to finish making coffee so I could pull out the final card and open my presents. When Chris and I started talking about Christmas traditions a few years ago, I was very insistent on doing an advent calendar for our child.

Now, I’m rethinking my principled stand. I have no idea how on earth my mom managed to come up with 25 different clues and surprises. Thinking about it, I have trouble coming up for seven things for one week! I may resort to a modified version of the calendar, where we have clues with activities for the weekends and something simpler for the weekdays. At least I’m reassured knowing that even my mom improvised a little. Since then, she’s confessed that she regularly switched the cards around when she didn’t have something ready for the next day.

Considering all of the effort our families put in for Christmas, I feel rather ashamed of our accomplishments this year – not many at all. I’ve finished most of my shopping and we have a wreath on our front door, which we bought from one of my favorite charities, H.O.M.E. But inside? Nothing. When we realized that we would only be home for two weekends in all of December, we even decide to not get a tree. Dragging Sprout out in the cold, pulling out all of the ornaments, and putting them all away just seemed like way too much time spent for not enough enjoyment. Even when I had a snow day off from work, we spent it playing with Sprout and building a snowman.

Fortunately, Sprout doesn’t care about our lack of decorations except perhaps that he won’t have all of these lovely, delicate things to stick in his mouth. We’ll definitely need to raise our standards in the future, but for now, the most important thing is not to stress out about more than we need to. With a new baby, we have plenty of other things to worry about.