Christmas with the children

Christmas is a feast for children. It is about the birth of a baby and every nativity scene is an icon of the veneration of childhood innocence and vulnerability: parents, poor men, rich men, animals all worship a little child. It is an astonishing fact, this claim that God manifests Himself in a tiny baby, astonishing and moving but strangely easy to accept, perhaps because two thousand years of Christianity have themselves helped us to respect and value children so much.

Even in the west, where Christmas is rapidly detaching itself from its Christian roots, the idea that Christmas is for and about children persists. Even for those without children, it is a family feast, a time when you return to the people you were with as a child. Colourful traditions appealing primarily to children have grown up; St Nicholas leaving goodies in children’s shoes, Santa Claus on his sleigh, Christmas trees with their magical, shiny, scented beauty, special cakes, presents. Adults love these things too of course but in enjoying them are often reliving their own childhood.

The road towards Christmas

By Julian Gibbs

Parents dream of making their children happy on Christmas day. They try to achieve this by giving presents but soon discover that the giving doesn’t always achieve their aim. For although Christmas is a celebration of childish wonder and innocence, it also often exploits and destroys these qualities. In the west now it is hugely commercialised. In Britain some shops contain Christmas goods by September. All shops are decorated long before Advent and in the months running up to Christmas the toy advertisements on television get longer, more numerous and more vivid every day. Lacking experience or critical awareness, children are even more vulnerable than adults to the message that possessions will make them happy.

They often are happy for a day or so. Children are powerless little individuals and the sudden joy of possessing so much so quickly is fantastically exciting. Children spend most of their lives not in control, having to do what they are told. Suddenly parents, the wielders of power, are giving them everything they want. I think it’s important to try to remember how this, and the anticipation of this, feels to a child so that what can seem like deplorable greed can be treated with understanding.

For children can also, it is true, disappoint their parents on Christmas day. They whine about the number and size of their own presents compared to their siblings’, they eat too much chocolate and get irritable, they covet a brother or sister’s gift and cry about their own. Often the very excitement of the day is enough to induce this sort of behaviour. The idea that we should try especially hard on this day to make others happy can disappear. What also disappears for many parents is the hope that Christmas with their own children will be as wondrous and magical time as Christmas was for them as children. Many mothers I know dread it and not only because of the expense.

Advent, a time of preparation

All this was on my mind when I met with a group of other women, all mothers of several children, to discuss how we prepare and celebrate Christmas. What follows is an amalgamation of the ideas and reflections of several people, including myself.

We discussed Advent first of all. By Advent, shops in Britain have already been decorated for weeks and it was felt by most that it was better to resist the heavy commercial temptations and to begin preparations as late as was practicable. Decorations are limited to the traditional Advent calendar, a picture on cardboard with windows that open each day to reveal another little picture. As a reminder that Advent is a preparation for Christ’s birth, most people felt that the image should be a religious one, most probably the Nativity. Children spend some time poring over these pictures and this is a kind of childish contemplation! Cathy makes her children share a calendar between them, feeling that this is what Christmas is all about. Maria tries to encourage her children to do special things during Advent, keeping their rooms particularly tidy for example.

One of the problems with the run up to Christmas is that children, particularly those old enough to understand about presents but young enough still to be profoundly self-centred, become obsessed with what they will be given. Encouraging them to enjoy planning their own giving is probably the best way of distracting them. Making presents is fun and it also encourages a further resistance to consumerism, though It can be hard work for parents! Cheap second hand toys can be bought at the many school and charity bazaars that are held at this time of year in the U.K. and my children love choosing presents for one another at such places. Giving children some responsibility for their parents’ choices also works well. Sarah lets her two younger children browse through charity gift catalogues and make suggestions. Maria charges her two older girls with the task of buying the presents they give as a family to other children.

Enjoyable family activities

Most houses in this country are now decorated for Christmas almost at the beginning of Advent. When I was a child it was never before Christmas Eve and it was so exciting: the smell of freshly gathered ivy, the shabby beloved decorations I hadn’t seen for a year, the thought that tomorrow was to be the best day of the year. Remembering this and not wishing my children to have had a surfeit of excitement before the day actually comes, I resist decorating until a week or so before Christmas. Decorating is a family activity which the children relish: the walk to the wood to pick holly, the buying and adorning of the Christmas tree - though it can be hard for the older ones who have to allow the smaller children to hang baubles in all the wrong places. Focusing on these preparations is another way of communicating that Christmas is about the joy (if also the difficulties!) of being together as a family, not just about the presents they are going to get.

Putting up the crib is an important part of preparing, an occasion, everybody felt, for reflection and discussion. Most people had more than one. Sarah gives each child one in their bedroom. My children make cardboard angels to go with the pottery figures and put cotton wool snow all round. The baby Jesus is placed in position only on the evening before Christmas. Until then, the figures are poised, kneeling round an empty space, waiting as we are.

Awakening a sense of wonder

And of course there is the Christmas story itself to tell. Cathy has a box full of special books for Christmas which are taken out only on Christmas Eve. Sarah emphasises the harder edges of the story as well as its beauty; the toughness of giving birth in a stable, the cruelty of Herod’s slaughter of the innocents and the terror of the flight into Egypt. I try to explain that suffering like this is still going on nowadays. I want my children to feel the unity the story expresses between past and present, rich and poor, human and divine.

All the women I spoke to have children under ten and thought them too young for Midnight Mass. They also felt it was important that going to Mass should be part of the festivities of Christmas day itself. Visiting the crib in church with its large figures and real hay and straw is one of the morning’s excitements for children. But the return to presents under the Christmas tree is also wildly exciting and its excesses can lead to unhappiness. We all agreed that children should recognise and thank the giver behind each present and not treat presents as an entitlement. This helps everybody enjoy the whole experience of exchanging gifts much more.

Even when all the presents are unwrapped, however, and the special Christmas food mostly eaten, life is still festive because usually there are still relatives staying or grandparents to visit. Cathy’s family continue to read their special Christmas books until Epiphany. Commercial pressures in Britain have expanded the preparation period for Christmas hugely but shortened its actual celebration; once the shopping for gifts is done, the emphasis turns to the winter sales. We all felt Christmas should be celebrated up until the Epiphany with visiting and stories and carols round the Christmas tree or crib. By that time, as Maria observed, everyone relishes the pleasure of things returning to normal!

When I first became a mother, I wanted to reproduce for my children the Christmases I had enjoyed as a child. I soon found that was impossible. I hope, however, that they experience pleasure at the repetition and beauty of rituals and wonder at the story as I did when I was a child. During our discussion, Maria said she felt that the greatest thing a parent could do was to awaken in a child a sense of wonder, the beginnings of spirituality. Christmas offers unique opportunities for this awakening.