Christmas Dream Gift

Today's Prompt: Many of the December holidays are marked with gifting. What is the one thing you really wish you could get as a gift this year (doesn't have to be a physical item)? 

Well, I've got quite a list of books on my Wishlist on Amazon, not to mention books I've flagged on Goodreads as things I'd like to read some day, and books are the things that spring most quickly to mind.

However, that's not really what I want, because as it stands, I can look over at my bookcase and quickly see several dozen books that I already own that I would like to read. I don't lack books. What I lack is the time and energy to read them. So what I really want, since the prompt did say, after all, that it didn't have to be a physical item, is the time and energy to read the books I want to read (and, for that matter, to write the things I want to write).

So I need my children to sleep through the night. In their own darned beds, not crawling in with us in the middle of the night. Then, I might have the energy for sustained attention, assuming we could also get them to go to bed at a decent our. And assuming I could discipline myself to go to bed at a decent hour.

Then I would actually need the time that wasn't constrained by work or family obligations or anything else, just free time.

So yeah, there's no Santa Claus on earth who could give me all that any of that, but I guess that's life.  And even if it's a life that doesn't have all those things--at this moment in time--it's still an awfully good life, filled with joys of its own. That's not to say I wouldn't appreciate having a break from work that was like the break from college junior year when I read Moby Dick 8 hours each day until it was finished, but you can't go back, can you?

No, I'm pretty sure you can't, so I'm prepared to live within the constraints of, you know, reality. And really, at Christmas--and any other time of year--it's best to appreciate what you've got. Like right now, as I try to bang out this blog post, I've got the cutest little 32-month-old all over my lap, getting in my way, sticking her fingers in my ears and eyes, and pulling me back and forth between annoyance and laughter, telling me what all the numbers and letters on my keyboard are, hunting and pecking them to extinction even while I try to type. And she's a total sweetheart, and if I didn't get a single present for Christmas this year, that would be okay too, because life is pretty darned good. 

Favorite Holiday Songs

Holidailies prompts us today to consider our favorite holiday song. I would have a hard time narrowing it down, in particular because it's a question of listening to music on the one hand and performing music on the other.

I'm sure I probably sang it in church before then, but I feel like I "discovered" the hymn "Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming" my freshman year of college. One of my fellow freshmen invited me to sing in a barbershop quartet, which I did, and as Christmas approached, he had us preparing a number of Christmas carols arranged in a barbershop style (well, sort of--not nearly as many dominant seventh chords as barbershop is usually known for), and going around to all the dorms caroling in four-part harmony. "Lo, How a Rose..." quickly became my favorite for its beautiful simplicity combined with the rhythmic complexity of the cadences that end three of the four phrases. Even though our barbershop quartet did not survive all four years, we did get together a group of male voices every year to go around caroling. And every year, I would get this carol in as many of our stops as I could. (For what it's worth, the barbershop arrangement of "Angels We Have Heard On High" was a close second, and I can remember loving that all the back to elementary school.

At my first high school teaching job, where one of my duties was directing the choirs, I started a tradition with the "double quartet" group of going around campus before Christmas break and caroling with the same carols I did in college. And, yes, "Lo How a Rose" was still my favorite over the six years that I taught at that school. I hope the boys I worked with remember that experience as fondly as I do.

And now, at my current school, I work with a student-led a cappella group, and this year for the first time we will be performing at the school's annual Vespers service, which is basically a whole lot of musical performance, readings of the relevant Biblical passages, and congregational carol singing. So what are we singing? I'm sure you've guessed. Tonight, we had a run-through of the program to handle logistics, and afterward my group had probably it's only chance to rehearse in the chapel.

And it was gorgeous. I'm not claiming any special powers as a music teacher--this is really just a song that, as long as you get it in tune, pretty much sells itself. Beautiful, as always. And I suppose that's part of why it's my favorite carol to perform.



Now, when it comes to listening, well, that's a different story. It's hard for me to pick just one. I have a soft spot in my heart for Bing Crosby, because when I was growing up we always listened to records of White Christmas and some other Crosby Christmas stuff. But I think I'm going to go in a different direction entirely: Tim Minchin's "White Wine in the Sun."



I really like Christmas.

Christmas 2013 Recap

Earlier, I recapped of the set-up for Christmas day and told about the start of the day. Here, we pick up the story from when the girls started opening their presents.

Our youngest doesn't quite know what to do with the Jumpolene. Or the beanbag chair, apparently. She did figure out the former before the day was done.

Our oldest knew exactly what the new purse is for.

My wife didn't want me in this picture, but I inserted myself. And my coffee mug inserted itself, too.

See? She's just stinkin' cute!

And she's already to start conducting the family Christmas carol sing...

Here, she gets her first good look at her new cousin. How will she react?

About like this, apparently.

I just liked the way this picture got both of our girls and (a glimpse of) their cousin.  And the Aunt Emmy they all share.

Lauren wasn't going to be denied her time with the wee babe, and our older girl gets to know her a bit better too.

After 11 straight hours of Christmas, at 5:45, our younger appeared to give up the ghost. Sadly, she got her second wind a couple hours later and is still going strong as I type.

Her sister, on the other hand, lost the battle with sleep right in the middle of a delicious, delicious brownie. Sweet dreams, sweetpea!

Christmas Wars and Battles Through the Ages

’Tis the season for crèche display controversies and public-school decoration debates and First Amendment argumentation, when all the ideologues get a little extra outrage or victimization in their stockings. The holiday is observed across the nation with injunctions and festive debates on cable television. Little children wait in line at the mall to have their picture taken with Bill O’Reilly or the Rev. Barry Lynn. (That last part, to my knowledge, is not true, but it should be.) -- Michael Gerson, in a wonderfully thoughtful piece recently in the Washington Post

This can be seen as a "War on Christmas," but as I've said for years now, a more accurate a description comes from the title of Steven Nissenbaum's history of the holiday, The Battle for Christmas. It's not so much that we have a war on Christmas--most of the most liberal atheists I know celebrate Christmas in some form or another. Instead, as Gerson notes, "Ultimately all of these disputes resolve into an argument about power: Who has the ability to define and enforce the boundaries of the acceptable?" And this isn't new. Over the centuries, we've had a lively debate about what Christmas is and isn't. And yes, through the years some people have wanted not to celebrate it at all (but mostly those people were Christians--more on that later).

The date December 25 was taken for Christmas back in the 4th century, not because anyone had evidence that this was the silentest, holiest night, but because those crafty 4th-century Christians wanted to annex the pagan winter festival. From the Roman Saturnalia onward Christmas was--and remained for many centuries--a time of drinking and debauchery. In 16th-century England, this Christmas celebration was a festival of misrule, in which people boozed it up, and the poor went door to door essentially demanding "trick or treat"--give us good food or money or gifts or we'll wreck $#!+. Think of carols like "We wish you a merry Christmas" and all its demands for figgy pudding and its assurance "we won't go until we get some," as well as all the wassailing songs and their demands. "Here we come a-wassailing," for instance, first reminds the listener that "We are not daily beggars / That beg from door to door, / But we are neighbors' children / Whom you have seen before"--and then they go on to ask for money, cheese, some of the Christmas loaf, and (of course!) some wassail. And in "Wassail, wassail," after they spend innumerable verses building up the master of the house, they get to the point, asking for drink and to be let in by the fire:

Come, butler, come fill us a bowl of the best
Then we hope that your soul in heaven may rest,
But if you do draw us a bowl of the small
Then down shall go butler, bowl and all!

Blessings are given to those who give, curses to those who are stingy or unobliging.


There's even a certain logic to this kind of thing, when we recall the way that the birth and life of Jesus inverted the social order--a "king," as he was styled, or even an aspect of God, born into an animal stall and ministering to the poor, the wretched, the outcast. A celebration that reversed the social hierarchy might be appropriate enough to celebrate the birth of Jesus.



The holiday as a festival of misrule was basically accepted by the upper classes, too, as a sort of pressure valve for the lower classes. The social hierarchy is inverted once a year: no big deal. The wealthy would get angry with particular wassailer or particular acts (the common folk could get pretty rowdy and destructive if their demands weren't met!), but overall the drinking and singing and demands for food and drink and gifts were tolerated.

For exactly this reason, Christmas had a hard time making its way across the pond, no matter how appropriate it may have been in its own way. The Puritans outlawed Christmas on the basis of its nature as a holiday of drinking and debauchery, as well as on the argument that the Bible doesn't indicate when Jesus's birthday was, thus God has no interest in having us celebrate it. Nonetheless, people rather like an excuse to drink and revel, especially in the bleak midwinter, so it continued on the edges of legality in New England and had a bit more success in other parts of the country.

Even hundreds of years ago, we had a battle over how--or even whether--Christmas should be celebrated, and arguably the most devout Christians were the ones fighting a "war on Christmas." However, since even the most puritanical of Puritans couldn't end Christmas, it ultimately ended up tamed by a rather unlikely force.

In the mid-to-late Nineteenth Century, retail stores were just starting to take off. Standardized manufacturing was just getting going on a large scale, and retail stores were outlets for all these material goods. The problem? The so-called Protestant Work Ethic was firmly entrenched in America. That is, people worked hard, saved their money, and didn't buy crap they didn't need. Retailers knew this would never do, so they are the ones who took the largest steps toward inventing--yes, inventing--the Christmas holiday as we know it. They made Santa Claus big (okay, years of cookies and whole milk did that) and they marketed Christmas as a time of love and good-will and--you probably guessed it--gift giving. They employed writers to create the stories that presented this kind of Christmas. They made people nostalgic for a type of Christmas that hadn't even existed before: a warm, cheery, wholesome holiday--and it became precisely that. The St. Nicholas mythos got drawn into it (St. Nick got pulled to Christmas from his normal place at--duh--the feast of St. Nicholas in early December). And some of our ideas were just flat-out made up. In the process, Christmas went from being a public holiday to a private one, from one celebrated in the streets with the community to one celebrated at home with the family. From a drunken revel for adults it became a child-centered holiday of gift giving.

I didn't get much further in the book, but I reckon it likely that, once commercial forces had sanitized Christmas and made it good and pure, Christianity decided it was high time to get back in the Christmas game, and they set about re-holy-daying it. That is, they claimed it for their own now that it was a wholesome time. And who can blame them? It's a nice little holiday.

But, of course, retailers did their job too well. We've gone from the protestant work ethic to the consumerist spend ethic, and whether we work enough or not, by Visa we can spend! We don't just spend the money we have, we spend the money we will have, which is just a more positive way of saying the money we haven't. As the culture has changed and become more materialistic, so too has the holiday become ever more materialistic. Religion, naturally enough, fights against this tendency (we're reminded that "Jesus is the reason for the season," i.e. not Santa Claus or gift-giving). So, too, do more secular types who nonetheless see something negative in crass materialism.

Secular though I may be, I have at least that much spiritualism that I mistrust unchecked materialism--even as I enjoy the hell out of a limited degree of it. Because yes, I like stuff, just like most Americans do. But--I think like most Americans here too--not to the exclusion of all else, and not beyond a certain point. There's a limit to how much stuff any person needs, and there are a lot of things more important than stuff. As long as we don't lose sight of those philosophical touchstones, gift-giving during this season is a wonderful, wonderful thing. Gift-giving is--to steal a phrase--an outward and visible sign of an inward condition. It's most meaningful when it comes from the heart and speaks to the heart, when it's freely given and not expected as a duty.

For me, Christmas isn't a religious holiday, though they're welcome to keep claiming it. It's a social institution that's evolved through many different forms and ultimately is--or will be--whatever we make of it. Although the name and its origins and history put a distinctly Christian stamp on it, our brief look at its history shows us what an uneasy time religion has had throughout the centuries in trying to claim it. That's why I say it's a social institution: it has shaped our culture and been shaped by our culture, and anyone who participates in that culture, it seems to me, has a claim on that tradition in whatever form they choose to stake that claim. Further, though it's not precisely true to say that America "is a Christian nation," it's certainly a nation in which Christianity has been essential in its history, and as a result even many in America who are secular in their outlook could be considered "secular Christians" or at least influenced by the culture of Christianity.

There was a festival at the winter solstice before Christianity claimed it by naming it Christmas, and I'd wager that in many places there was such a celebration long before Jesus was born. We need a holiday at this time of year, which is probably why many religious traditions--as well as non-religious traditions--have a holiday at this time of year. I suspect that even if something happened that caused everyone to cease believing in Jesus, we'd probably still celebrate Christmas, because it's just the sort of thing we want.

Never has that been more true for me than now, when I have two little girls: the magic of Christmas has become for many of us the magic of childhood, as we adults are fueled by their excitement. And really, both of our mythologies speak to this reverence for childhood, whether it's the story of Santa Claus bringing toys to good little girls and boys or the story of a child born in humble circumstances and destined to change the world.
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In the interest of full disclosure, I should say two things: 1) this is based almost exclusively on Nissenbaum's The Battle For Christmas and 2) I've published versions of this in four previous years on this and my former blog.

Merry Christmas morning!

With my mother-in-law sidelined this Christmas Eve / Morning, we're left to our own devices for Christmas breakfast. Lauren theoretically went out to Walmart last night to get the ingredients we needed for at least some of the things that my mother-in-law had planned, but it wasn't until Lauren and I woke up in the wee hours of the morning that either of us (me) thought to look into this whole breakfast-making thing.

So yeah: it turns out that we only have the ingredients for one of the breakfast dishes that was planned... and that's supposed to take 7-8 hours in the crock pot. And Creme Brulee French Toast sounded so good, too.

Not to worry: I was able to find a baked version of Creme Brulee French Toast that I can pull together in a pinch. Meanwhile, I'm contemplating whether or not breakfast sausage made with ground beef would be worth the effort.

One thing we did do right was the delivery of presents (I just brought stuff in from the car and then kept the kids asleep while Lauren and her sister did all the real work):

Besides all the other presents--to be opened later--you can see a Mickey Mouse beanbag chair, and a Minnie Mouse chair that's scaled down (not that our younger daughter is either that much smaller or very likely to heed the boundaries of "my chair" and "your chair").

 And then there's this (I had no idea from my casual acquaintance with the box that it would be this big!): it's called a Jumpolene. It should be just about the best thing ever, given how frequently they ignore our injunctions not to jump on beds.
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6:04 Update: our oldest (nearly 4) just woke up, complaining that we woke her up. Despite the picture that you can see, the first thing she gravitated toward was... the stockings, hung by the electric fireplace with care. But then she noticed... the smaller beanbag chair. She read the tag that marked it as being for her sister with mild disappointment, and had to be pointed toward the larger one for her.

And when she saw the jumpolene, she said "It's a little swimming pool!" Once we showed her what it actually was, she did love it.

Blue Christmases

A Dirge

                 Rough wind, that moanest loud

                    Grief too sad for song;

                 Wild wind, when sullen cloud

                    Knells all the night long;

                 Sad storm, whose tears are vain,

                 Bare woods, whose branches strain,

                 Deep caves and dreary main,—

                    Wail, for the world’s wrong!

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Monday morning, we awoke to headlines in the local paper that a 16-year-old boy had died in a car crash the night before, less than a mile from where we were putting our children to bed, and it turned out that he and his family lived more or less literally in my mother's back yard. I didn't know the young man or his family, but it was still heart-rending. The boy had just gotten his license recently. Another young man in the car with him is in the hospital, in critical condition last I heard. 

I can only imagine the one family's grief, the other's heart-sick worry. "Wail, for the world's wrong!" And so close to Christmas, I fear the season will come around with grief for years, if not for ever.

Another poem that perhaps speaks their heart is W.H. Auden's "Funeral Blues":

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,

Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,

Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my Sunday rest,

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought that love would last for ever; I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood,

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Less dramatically, but even closer to our hearts, Lauren's father called to tell us that her mother is in the hospital after what has turned out to be a non-heart-attack cardiac event. Due to further issues that arose while she was in the hospital, she will remain there until Thursday or Friday. She's expected to be fine, but of course it's worrisome, and although we'll be visiting her in the hospital tomorrow, it just won't be the same as waking up to Christmas morning with her or spending Christmas even all together as a family. It was strange to get to their house and not see her usual warm welcome. Splitting Christmas between my in-laws' house and the hospital is not what we expected.

Still, knowing the kind of tragedy that others are dealing with this Christmas,we feel fortunate that it doesn't appear to be anything more serious than it is.

Deck the Walls

Some days are, themselves, gifts. Yesterday evening--thanks in no small part to a massive storm sweeping into our area--certainly felt like just such a gift.

We'd been set up to have something very different, as I was scheduled for duty in the barrack last night and Lauren was scheduled to be at a Quiz Bowl tournament up in Michigan all day today. In other words, we weren't going to be seeing much of one another most of the weekend. But the impending Midwestern Snowpocalypse--and a scheduling snafu--changed all that.

To make a long, kind of complicated, and boring story a bit shorter, a colleague took my duty--saving me not only from the five hours away from my family but also from driving through whatever snow there would be at midnight. And thanks to the snow, Lauren's Quiz Bowl tournament was preemptively cancelled. In other words, the universe conspired to give us an evening together, unfettered by the prospect of one of us having to get up early and make a potentially-harrowing drive through the white and drifted snow.

So I made a dinner that combined leftover pork steak with new sweet potato hash browns (made in a waffle iron!), then I went out for a bit of shopping to stock up on some foodstuffs and buy some more Christmas decorations. What followed was a night of decking the halls walls to a playlist of Christmas tunes which did not, in fact, include "Deck the Halls."

Our tree has been decorated for a while now, and the snowmen have been occupying the window in peaceful protest, but Lauren just put up the "JOY" and I put up the garland all around the perimeter of our dining room. Mother Nature brought all the white decorations in the background.

Lauren put together this scene of winter tranquility--lacking a fireplace, she built and decorated one. Having extra lighted garlands, she festooned the china cabinet with winter cheer. Inside the china cabinet, on the right side, you might just be able to make out Mickey and Minnie, part of a Disney band that we're rapidly collecting: each of the characters has a song he or she plays, and as you add more of them, they'll play along with each others' songs. Get all five together and you've got a rockin' Christmas band (the last two should arrive Monday). And in the bottom right is a gadget I picked up in my shopping that allows us to have three outlets on remote control, turning our lights on with the click of a button.

And if you haven't already seen her, you can play "Where's Waldo?" with our "Elf on the Shelf," Minga Madinga. So I guess you'd be playing "Where's Minga?"

And now we're primed to have another gift of a day today: as Lauren said, getting this Saturday freed up like this might actually be better than a snow day on a weekday (which, after all, we'll pretty much never, ever get, teaching at a boarding school).

The Season of Disbelievin'

Our oldest daughter, at just-under-3, is still at the age where she's a believer in just about anything. Santa? Check. Minga Madinga, her Elf on the Shelf? Absolutely. The inherent awesomeness of her parents? Most of the time. Well, sometimes. If we're not denying her a toy, making her use the potty, turning off the TV/computer/iPod, trying to get her to eat, or generally engaging her when she's cranky (which, at almost-3, seems to be much of the time).

But anyway: belief. She's got it in spades. She sort of had some idea about Santa Claus last year, as being something more than just the terrifying overlord of the mall, sitting on his throne with minions taking pictures. This year, she pretty well gets it: Santa's the guy bringing toys (also, less positively, the guy who's going to take away her pacifiers and give them to younger children).

The thing I've realized as I watch her watching Christmas movies is how many of them deal actively with the subject of belief and--noticeably--disbelief. From animated Disney movies to live-action features, there's often a character saying "Santa Claus isn't real" or "There's no such thing as elves," or whatever. And, of course, like doubting Thomas, the characters on the screen get incredibly tangible proof to back up the reality of the pro-magical-Christmas crowd's claims.

I have to wonder, though: what about the kids (which is to say, pretty much all of them) who don't get to meet a talking dog who's Santa's best friend, or see a magical elf, or receive a visit from Santa himself? In other words, what I'm asking is: what's my daughter seeing in these movies? Do the disbelievers' assertions make any dent, in what is otherwise completely unchallenged belief?

Turning 90 degrees from there, I wonder if there's a sense in which Santa Claus is actually great preparation for atheism? Think about it. Most of us growing up with Santa Claus have first-hand experience with believing in a mythical being, which other people tell us is real, and then face the inevitable moment of disillusionment. We all get practice at what it's like to become an atheist, as we become an atheist with regard to Santa Claus. And the Tooth Fairy. And the Easter Bunny.

I suppose, as with any good whopper, we can always find ways to believe if we want to. "Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus..." As long as you can be as equivocal about the meaning of "is" as Bill Clinton was, then yes, there "is" a Santa Claus.

Building Imaginations

Another Holidailies blogger revealed her secretive love of Legos. It got me thinking about my own love affair with all sorts of building toys, that's being rekindled by my oldest daughter reaching the age where she's playing with such toys.

Surprisingly enough, I never had that many Legos. Lots of kids did when I was growing up, but I just had a few. I think my mom had a streak of contrariness that made her want to seek out toys that weren't quite as popular but were, just maybe, better than the ones everyone else was buying (no offense to all the Lego fans out there!). One kid I knew actually had an erector set, but I never got into that. The two construction toys that really engaged my imagination were Bristle Blocks and Construx.

Bristle Blocks, if you're not familiar with them, look like this:

As you can see, they come in different shapes and sizes, but they can lock together in multiple directions through the bristles that extend from all sides. Most of them were "flat," and I don't think all of the shapes existed that you can see in this photo: I think we had relatively flat ones and a few that were actual blocks. One of the big positives of bristle blocks was their versatility. I mean, I know people can do amazing things with Legos, but they always felt like bricks to me as a kid, like the only things I could make out of them were walls. And weird blocky robots. Bristle blocks just felt like they could do more. Also, they hurt in a whole different way when you stepped on them.

Construx, though, were probably my favorites.

This gives you a pretty good idea of what they are. Yeah, I know I just said that Legos seemed like all you could make were buildings and now I'm singing the praises of a toy that's basically a bunch of industrial building girders and panels to fit between them. But really, there were a ton of things you could do with them. Like:

space ships and planes, or

this Voltron-like robot thing. Just a couple point out. See the connection between the "hands" and arms? Those were plastic strips that were the length of the diagonal of two medium girders. And the panels on the shoulder piece--those fit in such a way that they could flip up as entry hatches. It's hard to see them, but I think the hips of the robot are pieces that fit on the medium square of girders as a round swivel piece. In the ship, you can also see that there's both a dedicated plane/spaceship cockpit of the Construx people that came with most sets and also some sort of tubes and hemi-spheres that made great satellite dishes as well as capping the tubes (and glowing in the dark!). Also: see the little blue cubes that have attachment points for the girders? They also had black ones that were hinges and orange ones that were a little bit bigger and allowed the piece attached to them to spin. A later set included connection points that had some kind of funky angle--not the most useful, but it added some versatility, particularly for getting things like X-Wing Fighter style double wings.

My point in all of this is just that as a kid I loved all these building toys, and as a parent I'm pretty enthusiastic about them too. They help challenge and build the imagination. To be perfectly honest, these toys still appeal to me today. I enjoy sitting down with my daughter and "helping" her build a tower out of blocks. Yes: doing it for her is helping by providing a model of what a totally awesome tower looks like.

So what were/are some of your favorite toys?

Healthy Decisions in the Land of Decadent Holidays

Often, people use New Year's as a springboard for new diet and fitness routines. Often, these attempts fail, but then sometimes people are very successful in these attempts. Certainly, there are a lot of products and programs on the market, such as P90X which gave me a good four months a couple years ago (starting in April, though, not January). Like P90X, several of these programs aim at 3 months, which seems to be a sort of sweet spot: long enough to have some significant results if successful, short enough to keep the end in sight, and more than enough time to establish habits, both in diet and exercise.

I had a thought back at the beginning of October: wouldn't it be great to start 3 months before New Year's instead of the same old "new start" thing? In a certain sense, it's absolutely, positively crazy. Change experts will tell you that it's important to get as many factors in your environment working with you: for instance, turning bad examples and enablers into helpful friends, coaches, and cheerleaders. For instance, if your spouse is the one who says "hey, let's order a pizza, eat a gallon of ice cream, and watch a movie tonight" when you're trying to drop 20 lbs, it's a huge help if you can get him or her on your side, not only not encouraging you to fail at your goals but actively working to help you stick to your diet and go exercise. If you can set up your physical environment in ways that help, too, you'll be way ahead: getting the junk food out of the house, or getting rid of the candy bowl on your desk at work, or changing your routine so that you don't walk by the staff room where that "nice" co-worker always puts out doughnuts.

Like I said, that's the good advice that the experts give you, and starting a weight-loss or health-improvement program on the months leading up to January 1 basically amounts to kindly asking the world to crush your ambitions. As the weather gets cooler, people tend to be more averse to going outside and exercising or, for that matter, leaving the nice warm bed early in the morning and going to the gym. The biggest dream killers, though, are the holidays. We might get through most of October unscathed, but then Halloween hits you with both barrels. If you have kids, you're almost doomed to be surrounded by candy, but even if you aren't, there are probably a bunch of well-meaning people at work bringing it in--heck, that might even be you! And Halloween, of course, is just a warm up for the Thanksgiving-Christmas season. Did you know that half of all American ovens are running at least 8 hours a day in November and December, baking cookies, cakes, pies, or bars? Okay, that's probably not true, but if you look around you, and you're trying to keep a healthy diet this time of year, it probably feels true.

And the thing is, it does feel like such a nice thing to do. I've done it, as recently as last week. I baked a double recipe of Mom's Cornflake Cookies to give first to one group of kids and then to another (with an "appropriate" number removed for our own enjoyment). I'm not taking any moral high ground here in my pointing out and implicitly condemning the empty-calorie-enablers.

"But John," I hear you saying, "Aren't you being too harsh on the nice people who give out candy like billionaires giving to Super-PACs and bake sugary, fatty desserts to give out like it will help us avoid the fiscal cliff?" At least, I think that's what you're saying: it's hard to hear you over the sounds of the crispy cookies I'm eating by the dozen. Who brought these in today, anyway?

...

Sorry, just woke up from a sugar coma. What was I saying? Oh yeah, I was talking about my bright idea to start a diet and fitness regimen on the months leading up to New Year's. It is, obviously, a hare-brained scheme, as only a rabbit, which naturally subsists on lawn clippings, could think it's a good idea. But here's the thing about it: what if you could make it work? If you could turn three months or two months or one month of the year that would normally be subtracting years from your life into 1-3 months of better health, that would be a huge net gain. In January, pure guilt, absent any intentional changes to your lifestyle, will probably cause you to lose a few pounds, if only from failing to eat in the face of depression. Your three months of Resolution-fueled goodness will only be slightly better than what you would have gotten anyway, you see?

Anyway, while it may be too late to have three good months before New Year's, you could always start here at the beginning of December. My wife is, and I'm awfully proud of her for swimming against the cultural current and trying to make changes now rather than just saying "I'll start next month..." You'd better believe I'm going to do everything I can to help her stay on track and meet her goals. And you know what? I'll support you too--if you need me to come to your place of employment and eat all the cookies, just give me the address and I'll be there. I've got your back (even if there is more of it to get than there was a month ago).

Giving and having, getting and doing

Christmas is for kids. At the very least, I think there's nothing more magical than a kid's Christmas. Last year, when our older daughter was on the verge of two, was the first Christmas that she was old enough to really be excited about, and it was the most exciting Christmas I can remember (of course, my memory is crap). That may also have something to do with being up until 2-oh-my-god o'clock putting together the kitchen we bought for her.

But when we think about Christmas being for kids, it's important to realize that "Christmas" is essentially what we make of it. For the Christians in the audience, there's a good chance that means keeping Jesus and the Nativity at the center of Christmas. Regardless of whether you celebrate a sacred or secular Christmas, though, I think it's important to be intentional about what you want Christmas to be, especially for those of us who are parents, who basically define Christmas within our own household (in, of course, the larger cultural context).

What we make of Christmas likely will influence what our children make of Christmas for themselves and their children. We not only create the Christmas experiences that they will look back on and say "Remember that one Christmas when..." or "Remember how on Christmas we would always..." but I also believe that how we approach Christmas (and every other day, but I'm talking about Christmas now) will have a profound influence on who our children become and what they come to value.

For instance, most of us at least pay lip service to the idea that we don't want Christmas to be all about toys and expensive things and consumerism. As with most lessons, our actions speak at least as loudly as our words do. No matter what we say that's critical of the materialism of Christmas, if we ourselves spend wildly trying to find "the perfect" gift or to buy more and more expensive gifts to make this Christmas the best Christmas ever... well, I trust you see where I'm going here.

With this in mind, I wanted to share something that came recently in a magazine called Family Fun, which my mother subscribed us to (thanks Mom!). Kristin Bock of Oshkosh Wisconsin offered the Idea of the Month in the most recent issue, and it boils down to this: each Christmas, each of their children receives "just three presents: a book, a toy or other coveted item, and an experience." So they emphasize the importance of books, they give one conventional gift, and then they emphasize the importance of experiences over stuff. As the mother describes it:

We weren't sure how that last one would be received, so on Christmas morning Norman and I held out bresth as each child opened a thin package with a folder and a note inside. The folder included descriptions of three "experience packages," and the note instructed the recipient to choose one.

For example, Isaac's options were a day trip to a cave (and some spending money for the gift shop), a trip to a local aviation museum, complete with an airplane ride, and an outdoor photography lesson as well as a photo editing session in the studio. Our son couldn't contain his enthusiasm. After much thought, he asked if he could pick two and have one count as his birthday gift in February!

A couple other points:

• each child gets his or her own experience, and the experiences are tailored to that child's particular interests
• they keep costs down by using family and friends to serve as tour guides, hosts, or teachers (they don't mention it, but this also adds a deeper relational element to the experience)
• for expensive trips, only one parent goes along

As she summarizes it, "Our family is really learning the value of doing rather than having." The Christmas experience, in other words, helps to reinforce the values that the parents want to teach. I wouldn't be surprised if this change, in fact, reinforced the values for the parents themselves, as well.

Christmas: Wars, Battles, and a General History of a Major Holiday

Many social conservatives want to see a "War on Christmas," but probably more accurate a description comes from the title of Steven Nissenbaum's history of the holiday, The Battle for Christmas. It's not so much that we have a war on Christmas as we have had over the centuries a lively debate about what Christmas is and isn't. And yes, through the years some people have wanted not to celebrate it at all (but mostly those people were Christians--more on that later).

The date December 25 was taken for Christmas back in the 4th century, not because anyone had evidence that this is when the famous little tyke was born, but because those crafty Christians wanted to annex the pagan winter festival. From the Roman Saturnalia onward it was--and remained--a time of drinking and debauchery for many centuries. In 16th-century England, it was the center of a festival of misrule, in which people boozed it up, and the poor went door to door essentially demanding "trick or treat"--give us good food or money or gifts or we'll wreck $#!+. Think of carols like "We wish you a merry Christmas" and all its demands for figgy pudding, as well as all the wassailing songs and their demands. "Here we come a-wassailing," for instance, first reminds the listener that "We are not daily beggars / That beg from door to door, / But we are neighbors' children / Whom you have seen before"--and then they go on to ask for money, cheese, some of the Christmas loaf, and (of course!) some wassail. And in "Wassail, wassail," after they spend innumerable verses building up the master of the house, they get to the point, asking for drink and to be let in by the fire.

The holiday as a festival of misrule was basically accepted by the upper classes, too, as a sort of pressure valve for the lower classes. The social hierarchy is inverted once a year: no big deal. The wealthy would get angry with particular wassailer or particular acts (the common folk could get pretty rowdy and destructive if their demands weren't met!), but overall the drinking and singing and demands for food and drink and gifts were tolerated.

For exactly this reason, Christmas had a hard time making its way across the pond. The Puritans outlawed it on the basis of its nature as a holiday of drinking and debauchery, as well as on the argument that the Bible doesn't indicate when Jesus's birthday was, thus God has no interest in having us celebrate it. Nonetheless, people rather like an excuse to drink and revel, especially in the bleak midwinter, so it continued on the edges of legality in New England and had a bit more success in other parts of the country. Since it couldn't be ended, it ultimately ended up tamed--by a rather unlikely force.

In the mid-to-late Nineteenth Century, retail stores were just starting to take off. Standardized manufacturing was just getting going on a large scale, and retail stores were outlets for all these material goods. The problem? America was firmly entrenched with the so-called Protestant Work Ethic. That is, people worked hard, saved their money, and didn't buy stuff they didn't need. Retailers knew this would never do, so they are the ones who took the largest steps to inventing the Christmas holiday as we know it. They made Santa Claus big (okay, years of cookies and 2%-to-whole milk did that) and they marketed Christmas as a time of love and good-will and--you guessed it--gift giving. They employed writers to create the stories that presented this kind of Christmas. They made people nostalgic for a type of Christmas that hadn't even existed before: a warm, cheery, wholesome holiday--and it became precisely that. The St. Nicholas mythos got drawn into it (and St. Nick pulled to Christmas from his normal place at--duh--the feast of St. Nicholas in early December). And some of our ideas were just flat-out made up. In the process, Christmas went from being a public holiday to a private one, from one celebrated in the streets with the community to one celebrated at home with the family. From a drunken revel for adults to a child-centered holiday of gift giving.

I didn't get much further in the book, but I reckon it likely that, once commercial forces had sanitized Christmas and made it good and pure, Christianity decided it was high time to get back in the Christmas game, and they set about re-holy-daying it. That is, they claimed it for their own now that it was a wholesome time. And who can blame them? It's a nice little holiday.

But, of couse, retailers did their job too well. We've gone from the protestant work ethic to the consumerist spend ethic, and whether we work enough or not, by Visa we can spend! We don't just spend the money we have, we spend the money we will have, which is just a more positive way of saying the money we haven't. As the culture has changed and become more materialistic, so too has the holiday become ever more materialistic. Religion, naturally enough, fights against this tendency (we're reminded that "Jesus is the reason for the season," i.e. not Santa Claus or gift-giving). So, too, do more secular types who nonetheless see something negative in crass materialism.

Secular though I may be, I have at least that much spiritualism that I mistrust unchecked materialism--even as I enjoy the hell out of a limited degree of it. Because yes, I like stuff, just like most Americans do. But not to the exclusion of all else, and not beyond a certain point. There's a limit to how much stuff any person needs, and there are a lot of things more important than stuff. As long as we don't lose sight of those philosophical touchstones, gift-giving during this season is a wonderful, wonderful thing. Gift-giving is--to steal a phrase--an outward and visible sign of an inward condition. It's most meaningful when it comes from the heart and speaks to the heart, when it's freely given and not expected as a duty.

For me, Christmas isn't a religious holiday, though they're welcome to keep claiming it. It's a social institution that's evolved through many different forms and ultimately is--or will be--whatever we make of it. Although the name puts a distinctly Christian stamp on it, our brief look at its history shows us what an uneasy time religion has had throughout the centuries in trying to claim it. That's why I say it's a social institution: it has shaped our culture and been shaped by our culture, and anyone who participates in that culture, it seems to me, has a claim on that tradition in whatever form they choose to stake that claim. There was a festival at the winter solstice before Christianity claimed it by naming it Christmas, and I'd wager that in many places there was such a celebration long before Jesus was born. We need a holiday at this time of year, which is probably why many religious traditions--as well as non-religious traditions--have a holiday at this time of year. I suspect that even if something happened that caused everyone to cease believing in Jesus, we'd probably still celebrate Christmas, because it's just the sort of thing we want.

Never has that been more true than now, when I have one little girl and another on the way--the magic of Christmas has become for many of us the magic of childhood, as we adults are fueled by their excitement. And really, both of our mythologies speak to this reverence for childhood, whether it's the story of Santa Claus bringing toys to good little girls and boys or the story of a child born in humble circumstances and destined to change the world.
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In the interest of full disclosure, I should say two things: 1) this is based almost exclusively on Nissenbaum's The Battle For Christmas and 2) I've published versions of this in three previous years on this and my former blog.

The Present Conflict

Lauren told me today of a story a student told her from her childhood: at some point, her older brother sneaked down to the tree early on a Christmas morning and opened his presents before anyone else had gotten up. To solve this little problem, her parents started putting coded tags on the presents so that no one knew who each present was for until their parents revealed the code on Christmas morning. I thought that was a pretty clever solution.

But her brother wasn't nearly as bad as either Lauren or I were. Once, when I was probably preschool age or early in elementary school, sometime in mid-December I took a couple of my presents into a space behind the couch and opened them. I was definitely young enough that I had no plan whatsoever, so my misdeed was quickly discovered. Lauren, meanwhile, at age 12, had an aunt who taught her the tricks of opening her presents and resealing them without being detected. Another time, Lauren found the boom box that her parents were getting her and played with it--several times--before Christmas. She is, by her own admission, a terrible present-seeker: by which I mean that she has the terrible habit of searching relentlessly until finding them--she's quite good at it!

Speaking of hiding presents though, my mom had what must have been a terrible experience sometime around when I was in kindergarten. She was taking me to the babysitter one foggy morning when she ran into high water and pushed forward far enough into it that she got stuck. She made it worse when she opened the door and water flooded in. What I didn't know--but she was acutely aware of, was that she and my father had hidden all of my Christmas presents in the trunk of the car! She was sure they would all be ruined, but someone soon came by with a truck and pulled us out, and she discovered later to her relief that the gifts were undamaged.

So what stories do you have, either as parents or as children, of the arms race betwixt the two, in seeking to surprise or to be surprised (just a bit earlier than scheduled)?

Merry Christmas--or whatever

I was awakened around 3:30 this morning, either by the dog wanting to go out or Thea wanting to not have a stuffy nose so she could go back to sleep. Either way, while taking Beaker out, I checked e-mail and Facebook on my iPod Touch, and amidst all the unremarkable well-wishes were also "Merry CHRISTmas" and "It's Merry Christmas NOT Happy Holidays" and a couple others along similar lines.

This has to be the most bullshit controversy in the history of bullshit controversies.

The supposed issue is over the secularization of Christmas. "Holidays," of course, means "holy days." So it's not secularizing Christmas, it's just acknowledging that there are many possible holy days that someone might be celebrating. Granted, most people don't necessarily think "holy days" when they say "holidays"--they think "day off" maybe or "something people celebrate," and we do use "holiday" to refer to things like New Year's Eve / New Year's Day, which I doubt most of us think of as sacred days.

But anyway, my point is that it seems to me that the commentators pushing this "war on Christmas" or "just say no to Happy Holidays" agenda are really in the business of stirring up controversy for the sake of getting people angry so that they'll donate money and support particular political agendas. And what they're playing off of seems to be the desire by some Christians not to live in a pluralistic society, to be surrounded only by other Christians and not to acknowledge, if possible, that other belief systems even exist, except perhaps as an "other" to be feared and hated or, at the very least, mistrusted.

Ultimately, if Christians want to "fight" against the "secularization" of Christmas, then they should start by doing so in their own homes. Dont' buy so much crap. Focus on prayer and kindness, peace and joy and brotherhood and all that. If other people want to celebrate Christmas in their own way--even a completely secular way--why is it anyone else's business, anyway? Opt out of the Christmas you don't want, opt into the Christmas you do: why isn't it as easy as that?

On that note, I'll close. Here's hoping you had the Christmas you wanted and that your holiday season has been a good one, whatever and however you choose to celebrate (or not).

Christmas parties

I knew that Lions were meat eaters, so the chili was no surprise, but I had no idea they could go through booze at such a prodigious rate.

My father-in-law, you see, is a member of his local Lion's Club and he took us along to their annual Christmas party. It was a pot luck including a half dozen different chilis and lots of goodies. There was a self-serve bar and a double culmination to the evening: a visit from Santa for the kids and a raffle for a "Basket of Cheer" (i.e. bottles of booze) and individual bottles as well. We had a nice time.

I was reminded of all the Christmas parties I went to as a kid, though they bore only a passing resemblance to this one.

My parents were members of the Grange: they made apple butter and cider with the Grange, they made sausage, they were part of the Grange bowling league. And every December, they had a Christmas party. I don't remember much about it--some kind of boring meeting followed by a gift exchange for the adults and Santa for the kids--either the parents brought a gift for their child or they brought a gift for a particular gender (matching their child's). Maybe they did each at different times, I'm not sure.

I think the one I loved the best as a kid was our church's. I can't remember whether or not there was something upstairs in the sanctuary before we wound up in the church basement for a potluck. We always ended up singing Christmas carols, led by Mr. Behm. He was a leader in the church, he was a middle school science teacher (I think every kid who went through our school system had him for 7th grade science) and the announcer at the high school football games (and the loudest singer of the national anthem at those games). He led us through various carols, both religious and secular. He was famous for his "Twelve Days of Christmas" and the way he made us kids laugh on "Five Golden Rings," which sometimes when on and on ("Five golden ring-ing-ing-ing-ing-ing-ing-ing-ings!") and then sometimes cut off much more quickly (as kids, we were easy to surprise into laughter). The last song, though, would always be "Jingle Bells," and during the song, we'd hear the jingling of bells coming down the stairs and Santa Claus would arrive. I don't think we got any gifts other than candy canes and popcorn balls, but we got to sit on Santa's lap and tell him what we wanted.

Really, though, it was the singing that made the biggest impression on me. I always loved singing.

What about you? What are the more memorable Christmas parties you've been to, either as a child or an adult?

Christmas Wars and Battles: a general history of a major holiday that's sometimes private

Many social conservatives want to see a "War on Christmas," but probably more accurate a description comes from the title of Steven Nissenbaum's history of the holiday, The Battle for Christmas. It's not so much that we have a war on Christmas as we have had over the centuries a lively debate about what Christmas is and isn't. And yes, through the years some people have wanted not to celebrate it at all (but those people were Christians--more on that later).

The date December 25 was taken for Christmas back in the 4th century, not because anyone had evidence that this is when the famous little tyke was born, but because those crafty Christians wanted to annex the pagan winter festival. From the Roman Saturnalia onward it was--and remained--a time of drinking and debauchery for many centuries. In 16th-century England, it was the center of a festival of misrule, in which people boozed it up, and the poor went door to door essentially demanding "trick or treat"--give us good food or money or gifts or we'll wreck $#!+. Think of carols like "We wish you a merry Christmas" and all its demands for figgy pudding, as well as all the wassailing songs and their demands. "Here we come a-wassailing," for instance, first reminds the listener that "We are not daily beggars / That beg from door to door, / But we are neighbors' chidren / Whom you have seen before"--and then they go on to ask for money, cheese, some of the Christmas loaf, and (of course!) some wassail. And in "Wassail, wassail," after they spend innumerable verses building up the master of the house, they get to the point, asking for drink and to be let in by the fire.

The holiday as a festival of misrule was basically accepted by the upper classes, too, as a sort of pressure valve for the lower classes. The social hierarchy is inverted once a year, no big deal. The wealthy would get angry with particular wassailer or particular acts (they could get rowdy and destructive if their demands weren't met!), but overall the drinking and singing and demands for food and drink and gifts were tolerated.

For exactly this reason, Christmas had a hard time making its way across the pond. The Puritans outlawed it on the basis of its nature as a holiday of drinking and debauchery, as well as on the argument that the Bible doesn't indicate when Jesus's birthday was, therefore God has no interest in having us celebrate it. Nonetheless, people rather like an excuse to drink and revel, especially in the bleak midwinter, so it continued on the edges of legality in New England and had a bit more success in other parts of the country. Since it couldn't be ended, it ultimately ended up tamed--by a rather unlikely force.

In the mid-to-late ninetheenth century, retail stores were just starting to take off. Standardized manufacturing was just getting going on a large scale, and retail stores were outlets for all these material goods. The problem? America was firmly entrenched with the so-called Protestant Work Ethic. That is, people worked hard, saved their money, and didn't buy stuff they didn't need. Retailers knew this would never do, so they are the ones who took the largest steps to inventing the Christmas holiday as we know it. They made Santa Claus big (okay, years of cookies and 2%-to-whole milk did that) and they marketed Christmas as a time of love and good-will and--you guessed it--gift giving. They employed writers to create the stories that presented this kind of Christmas. They made people nostalgic for a type of Christmas that hadn't even existed before: a warm, cheery, wholesome holiday--and it became precisely that. The St. Nicholas mythos got drawn into it (and pulled to Christmas from its normal place at (duh) the feast of St. Nicholas. And some of our ideas were just flat-out made up. In the process, Christmas went from being a public holiday to a private one, from one celebrated in the streets with the community to one celebrated at home with the family.

I didn't get much further in the book, but I reckon it likely that, once commercial forces had sanitized Christmas and made it good and pure, Christianity decided it was high time to get back in the Christmas game, and they set about re-holy-daying it. That is, they claimed it for their own now that it was a wholesome time. And who can blame them? It's a nice little holiday.

But, of couse, retailers did their job too well. We've gone from the protestant work ethic to the consumerist spend ethic, and whether we work enough or not, by Visa we can spend! We don't just spend the money we have, we spend the money we will have, which is just a more positive way of saying the money we haven't. As the culture has changed and become more materialistic, so too has the holiday become ever more materialistic. Religion, naturally enough, fights against this tendency (we're reminded that "Jesus is the reason for the season," i.e. not Santa Claus or gift-giving). So, too, do more secular types who nonetheless see something negative in crass materialism.

Secular though I may be, I have at least that much spiritualism that I mistrust unchecked materialism--even as I enjoy the hell out of a limited degree of it. Because yes, I like stuff, just like most Americans do. But not to the exclusion of all else, and not beyond a certain point. There's a limit to how much stuff any person needs, and there are a lot of things more important than stuff. As long as we don't lose sight of those philosophical touchstones, gift-giving during this season is a wonderful, wonderful thing. Gift-giving is--to steal a phrase--an outward and visible sign of an inward condition. It's most meaningful when it comes from the heart and speaks to the heart, when it's freely given and not expected as a duty.

For me, Christmas isn't a religious holiday, though they're welcome to keep claiming it. It's a social institution that's evolved through many different forms and ultimately is--or will be--whatever we make of it. Although the name puts a distinctly Christian stamp on it, our brief look at its history shows us what an uneasy time religion has had throughout the centuries in trying to claim it. That's why I say it's a social institution: it's shaped our culture and been shaped by our culture, and anyone who participates in that culture, it seems to me, has a claim on that tradition in whatever form they choose to stake that claim. There was a festival at the winter solstice before Christianity claimed it by naming it Christmas, and I'd wager that in many places there was such a celebration long before Jesus was born. We need a holiday at this time of year, which is probably why every religious tradition--as well as non-religious traditions--has a holiday at this time of year. I suspect that even if something happened that caused everyone to cease believing in Jesus, we'd probably still celebrate Christmas, because it's just the sort of thing we want.
-----------------------------------------
In the interest of full disclosure, I should say two things: 1) this is based almost exclusively on Nissenbaum's The Battle For Christmas and 2) I've published versions of this in two previous years on my former blog.