I love Christmas (could you tell?). I’m not a Christian so Christmas might mean something different for my family but this post is going to be about abundance and guilt-free holiday celebrating.

Every year we plan all year, we save all year. I don’t believe in charging the holiday so it requires conscious pre-planning all year long. Some years that’s a lot more work than other’s.  We are good all year, we don’t indulge our kids often, if ever. I shop sales and resales. I scope out craigslist and our local classifieds for bargains. The kids have to earn any money they want for things they want to buy. They pretty much hate that they don’t get an allowance but its important to me that they learn that life isn’t about gimmes and freebies - things must be earned and earning things involves working and effort. Sometimes this means they go without something they really want becuase they really want to earn it even less than they really want to own it. Life gives us that option too.

Christmas, though, is the one time of year when we can let it all go and live in excess. We bake crazy amounts of sweets and eat them all. We make rich, decadent meals and eat them all. We buy a bazillion gifts and open them all. We decorate our houses with incredible lights and decorations, inside and out. Not environmentally conscious at all, huh?

Yet there is this aire of guilt that sort of permeates the Christmas season. Did we give our kids too many gifts? Too much sugar? Take in too many calories? Where do they sell the compact fluorescent Christmas lights? How do we give to others to balance it all out? How do we teach our kids that the holidays are about giving, not receiving? How do we make Christmas not about the “stuff”?

My husband retold me this story he heard this Christmas season that I believe was told to him with the goal of relaying a certain message: a family saved all year for a down-payment on a new house and gave that as a gift to their family for Christmas. Their teenage child was unhappy that this was all she got for Christmas, spoiled brat that she was, right? So she was sent to work a homeless shelter for *perspective*. That’ll teach her for wanting a nice CD under the tree or maybe a new sweater. Ungrateful child. These stories are all so common this time of year. We are all not supposed to want a thing, we are supposed to be happy and thankful for what we have which is, apparently, impossible to do while also enjoying being the recipient of gifts.

What I heard in the retelling of this story is how this new house probably wouldn’t have been considered “Christmas” at all if they finalized the purchase of the house in, say, June. And how bizarre it is that adults expect kids to feign gratitude for adult decisions that deeply impact their lives. Maybe the kid was perfectly happy in her current house and neighborhood and school and how maybe what she needed was not a new house but something more personally beneficial and a lot less expensive! Maybe it was the parents who needed some perspective here. Regardless I’m willing to bet the “lesson” of working in the homeless shelter was lost entirely on the teen as it relates to the rest of her life. I wouldn’t be surprised if the end result was the exact opposite of what was intended.

A small aside - we adults should also be careful about predicting the expectations and experiences of our children. Children don’t see life through adult eyes and sometimes we adults see a lot more of a situation on a very different level than a child. I remember when we were going to Vietnam we were warned by several people that we should expect our children to undergo a deep level of culture shock and that they would likely be very disturbed by what they saw and experienced and it would alter the way they viewed life. It would be one of “those” lessons - like the homeless shelter experience. Except that my kids didn’t experience any culture shock at all. And they found the entire experience to be exactly what they needed but not in the ways expected. They wanted to stay forever and move to Vietnam. Even now, they get “homesick”, they want to go back any chance they get. So much for “perspective”. Maybe its that they are not blind to poverty in their everyday world? Maybe its that where we ethnocentric American Adults see poverty, a child might see simplicity, happiness and beauty. I like to think its their inner Buddhist nature But back to the subject….

On Christmas morning before I even peeked out my bedroom door I read the most excellent article on this topic written by the brilliant Brett Paesel in the latest issue of Wondertime mag (I’d link but the article isn’t on the website so pick up a copy or, better yet, subscribe!). She makes the case for indulgence that I’ve been trying to put into words for years.

So, paraphrasing her article, here is what I have to say: indulge in abundance. Celebrate the gifts of the season. Celebrate your blessings. Celebrate your family. Eat ALOT. Share gifts. Do things YOUR way. Shun the guilt. It is *ONE* day of the entire 365 days in the year. One day. Why do we make ourselves feel so sick over one day when we could better put that energy into changing how we live the other 364 days of the year? Why do we focus on what message we are sending our kids this day but not a single other day? Sure we sort of give lip service to doing more, being better, teaching our kids through example. But not like this one day a year! Abundance is celebration, it’s appreciation and magic and love and joy and freedom from the responsibilities to ourselves, our kids and our world that burden us the rest of the year.

Instead, starting today and each day forward, LIVE the giving. Give to others, volunteer, help out in your community, at your kid’s school, give to a charity, contribute to VVAI, be involved in politics or wherever you feel led to exact change in the lives of others. GIVE. Teach your children to give. Teach them that things must be earned, that money comes from hard work. Teach them that there are those less fortunate and stress that the less fortunate are less fortunate ALL year long, not just during the holidays. Deliver a meal to the elderly. Be careful what your money supports. Buy local. Grow your own garden. Change your bulbs to compact fluorescents as the old incandescents burn out. Once a month participate in a Random Act of Kindness - pick up the tab for a person who is dining alone or the car behind you at Starbucks. Send a gift to a needy family FOR NO REASON in, gasp, APRIL! Anonymously! Send mail and goodies to a soldier in Iraq. LIVE what you want your children to BE.

And next year you can celebrate with abundance ONE day of the year and you won’t have to worry or feel guilty that you are sending the wrong message to your kids. Because truly Christmas is magical and special and kids are not dumb. They will learn from the other 364 days of the year and appreciate the abundance and magic all the more on the one day a year when you can all let loose.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 26th, 2007 at 9:18 pm and is filed under Holidays & Vacations, Parenting, Taboo Topics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.