Finding Some Sanity in the Five Days to Christmas Freak Out
It is December 25 at 3:43pm. Your family’s Christmas celebration has ended in a confetti cannon of wrapping paper detritus and plastic packaging. Your children are moving from sugared-up mania toward the downslope of despair. Someone is writing a sternly worded letter to Santa because he brought The Wrong Lego Set. Someone else is sobbing softly in the corner because you would not let them eat a two-foot candy cane for lunch.
Everyone has a vague feeling of emptiness despite you having maxed out the credit cards for all this fun. You are almost (almost) wishing you were a poor family á la 19th-century Dickensian London so your ungrateful children would actually understand the true meaning of Christmas.
How did they become such materialistic monsters? With your ideals and your values and earnest efforts to infuse Christmas with a little more meaning this time, how could things have gone so off the rails?
Relax. Breathe. You’ve just had a visit from the Ghost of Christmas Future, but it’s not too late to flip the script. There’s time to set some simple intentions and clarify our values so that this holiday doesn’t end in tragedy, or worse: ennui. What is the Christmas we really want our families to have, and have ourselves? [Hint: simple, meaningful, peaceful, generous, grateful and magical.] And can we do what it takes to make that happen, when we are so busy and exhausted and distracted?
To start: for Christians, Christmas is not one day long, but twelve - starting on December 25th and ending on January 6th when the Magi delivered the very first Christmas gifts (a great excuse for giving teacher presents when the kids return to school from the ironically titled “break” without feeling bad about it). Add to that: Advent is the four week period tiptoeing up to Christmas. Spreading our rituals and engagement over forty days takes the pressure off of one or two days to deliver all that’s expected. Even if your family is spiritual but not religious, we encourage you to adopt this timeline to bring a bit more of the sacred back into your holiday season.
Now, once you’re ready to map a simple and joyful path through Advent and Christmas, here are some guiding principles from child development, and some low-key ideas for how to enact them from an open, progressive approach to the holiness of the season.
Kids thrive on routine and love ritual.
No matter the time of year, or how many parties and pageants there are to attend, kids of all ages thrive on routine. Any parent who has let bedtime slip for one too many screenings of Elf or allowed cookies for breakfast too many days in a row knows this by the toddler tantrums and teenage moods that inevitably follow. Kids (and heck, parents too) need routines to self-regulate. Knowing what to expect allows them (and us) to feel in control. Regular patterns of eating and sleeping keep us all in neurochemical balance. It can be tempting at the holidays to let routines slide in our attempts to cultivate the magic of ritual, but the good news is you really don’t have to. This is one place where you can have it both ways - routine AND ritual.
Be wary of overscheduling. Most of us, and small children in particular, are too busy. RSVP yes only to the invitations that really call to you. Your kids will better remember and benefit from fewer more positive “special” occasions that a whole lot of events that ended in disaster. Stick to bedtimes and daily routines as much as possible.
Make kids a part of the rituals of preparation. Kids can help plan menus, bake, or gift shop for others. Give them jobs that match their abilities, or are a little bit of a stretch for them. Be a team so no one person of the family is burdened by holiday prep. Add the magic of playing the same holiday favorites on repeat.
Simplify your gift giving. Batch cook, bake or make thirty of the same homemade gift rather than coming up with a unique gift for everyone in your office or extended family. Let your kids be helpers in these activities. Set up a Secret Santa with close family or friends so that each gift-getter receives fewer things of better quality. This also allows each gift giver to spend time and thought on choosing something uniquely suited to them.
Create one or two simple rituals that anticipate the approach of Christmas. Whether you go to church (a great ritual and routine!) or not, you are your child’s first and most present spiritual teacher. Ditch the Elf on a Shelf in favor of lighting an Advent Wreath candle each week and/or following a chocolate-free Advent Calendar. Pick a movie you will watch as a family every year, or make a ritual of cutting down your own tree, with cocoa and a prayer sent up in thanksgiving for the life of the tree as it falls. On St. Nicholas Day (December 6), play Santa by handing out candy canes or spare change throughout the day. On Christmas Eve, hand out stockings filled with necessities to unhoused folks, or bring dinner to people working low-wage jobs (gas station, convenience store) in your neighborhood. Be brave and carol your block! Enlist your kids in making new traditions you will all enjoy, and that will make you feel great after you have done them.
It really is better to give than receive.
Science confirms what Christianity has historically taught: generous people report higher levels of happiness. Gratitude practice--focusing on what we have, rather than what we want--improves both mental and physical health. Here are some ways to get ahead of the Gimmes that arise when the Christmas advertising starts in earnest:
Focus on gift-giving over gift-getting. Ask kids to write their Christmas list once over Thanksgiving weekend, then be done with it--no second drafts. Do a Secret Santa between kid cousins, and do a Yankee Swap with adults, to reduce consumption and overspending. Set a budget and stick to it for each child. Consider giving your child only three gifts in addition to stocking stuffers, because Jesus got three gifts, and it is his birthday we are celebrating. Talk with kids about money: ask them “How much is enough? What is the difference between needing and wanting something?” and listen for their answers. Follow Glennon Doyle’s poem-prompt for list-making: “something you want, something you need, something to wear, something to read.”
Spread out the joy. Hold back some gifts for Days 2-12 of Christmas. Draw out the experience of receiving to make it more pleasurable: slow, steady tapas rather than gorging on an all-you-can-eat buffet. Make Christmas Eve and Christmas Day about more than gifts, including other rituals--finally putting the star on the tree and baby Jesus in the creche, bringing the Christ light home from church to light your own wreath, setting out beer and salad for Santa (he’s had enough cookies), singing outside your front door to the stars.
Give credit where credit is due. Consider asking Santa to bring stocking stuffers and having parents and others give the bigger presents. This encourages gratitude in our children for our own generosity toward them, and relieves the awkwardness of kids comparing their haul from Santa with friends at other income levels. Make a ritual out of everyone expressing gratitude for their gifts by having one person at a time give all their gifts and feel the flood of thanks (note that appropriate thanks run the gamut, and should not include forced hugging or kissing of aunts and uncles).
Make charitable giving a central part of your Christmas experience. Set a budget for year-end giving (that may help your taxes owed as well!) that matches or exceeds your spending on stuff. Enlist your kids’ input on where your giving should go based on your family’s interest and values: ending homelessness? Child poverty or climate care? Visit the recipients of your giving if they are local and put in some sweat equity, or meet those impacted positively by your gift to make a human connection and deepen your capacity to give even more. Being a philanthropist is addictive!
Give your time as well as your treasure. Time is the most precious commodity in most of our families. Pick one weekend afternoon to do something generous for others as a family: visit a nursing home or homebound neighbor and bring your “therapy dog,” babysit for a single parent so they can make their own preparations, serve at a shelter on an ordinary day and not on the holiday itself when most people suddenly get virtuous. Reflect on the experience afterward with your kids: how did it make you feel? Where did you feel or experience the presence of God, a holy tingle, a “warm tickle” as one of our kids puts it?
Kids are able to understand mystery and tolerate ambiguity.
It’s true that kids are primarily concrete thinkers until early elementary school. But all children love magic and mystery, and can accept things that are abstract or beyond their understanding. When we challenge them to ask questions we challenge them to grow. Don’t worry about confusing them if you introduce Santa (not real) and God (real--depending on your belief system). Let their belief and unbelief unfold without robbing them of the magic of young childhood, or its opposite problem: worrying that you are indoctrinating them into religion. They have their own thoughts and beliefs--and inviting them into yours will give them a framework toward understanding their own. Wonder together to experience transcendence.
This piece can help with differentiating God from Santa and explaining it to young children. TL:DR: Santa was a real person, Saint Nicholas, and his spirit endures. Jesus was a real person, whose spirit and presence endures in a different, broader way than Santa--in a way that can gift us every day, not just on December 25.
It’s OK if you don’t know what you believe, or are uncertain about the religious aspect of Christmas. Tell the stories: of Mary and Joseph’s experience with angels, the journey and birth. Talk about the villains and heroes and mixed-bag characters. Go be part of an unrehearsed Christmas Eve pageant at a church--and talk afterward about what they heard, saw and understood from the story. What “part” did they play? How is that part like or not like their real-life selves?
Here’s a list of our favorite children’s Christmas books and Bibles. Talk about what parts resonate with you, what you believe really happened, and most importantly, ask them what they think. Do this every year--as they grow, their answers will change.
Ask big questions, even of younger kids. What does it mean that God took on human form? What does it mean that God became vulnerable--even almost died when a baby? How can vulnerability change the world? What does “good will toward men” (plus women and children and nonbinary people) look like, and how can we practice it? Have you ever had a dream like Joseph, that didn’t feel like a dream--but felt like a message from God? Have you ever heard angels? Make up your own big questions and wonderings, and don’t worry about finding answers. The questions are enough.
So there it is. Another Christmas list of things you should do. Treat it like every other holiday to-do list, with a knowing and acceptance that it cannot possibly all get done. We hope that if you make even one or two of these shifts toward a more intentional Christmas season, when 3:43 arrives on December 25, you’ll find yourselves a little less touched by madness and a little more touched by wonder, joy, and sticky fingers resting gently in yours.
Wishing you peace or at least a smidge of sanity. Merry Christmas,
Molly and Ellen