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AustinMama offers up some Daddy props.
- Robert A. Heinlein
Holiday Stuff
"No one ever went broke saving money."
- H. Jackson Brown
One obstacle I face as a parent comes from succeeding in
a goal I set for myself. To a large extent, I was embarrassed by our
poverty relative to my playmates as a child, and didn't feel I had any
significant say in most of the decisions that affected me. I resolved
that my sons' lives wouldn't be like that. Guess what: it's not! The
boys have a lot of input into our household shopping habits, and Keefe
has easily twenty times the number of toys I amassed throughout my
entire childhood. Sometimes it makes it hard for me to understand and
empathize with him. I never anticipated that his way of looking at the
world would seem so alien, but it makes sense in light of how
differently his universe operates. If you live in a Little House on
the Prairie book, the orange in your Christmas stocking feels like
treasure, and you cherish your threadbare toys as irreplaceable. For
more privileged Western kids, a kind of serial attachment seems to be
the best you can manage, where the new toy is the pinnacle of your
possessions for a span ranging from a few weeks to somewhere around
half way home from the toy store where it was purchased. One of my
knee-jerk fears of late is that we'll need to buy him a new raincoat
every time it rains, since he is so unconscious about what he does with
his current one. Hats, gloves, and school supplies don't fare much
better. It's just symptomatic of a disposable culture.
It also annoys me that several local businesses have started putting
Christmas displays out before Halloween (with carols
starting even a week earlier) -- making me more reflexively cranky about holiday
commercialism. It's bad enough that North Americans spend enough on
Christmas gifts to eliminate global hunger for six months. When are we
going to collectively realize that the true path to happiness isn't in
a second DVD player, and how do we help encourage that understanding in
our children? At least I can be thankful that this year's over
saturated must-have toy, the beyblade, is in the ten dollar price
range, but how long will it take before all 150 million of them are in
our landfills?
The best solution I can offer to this utter madness is to reinvest more
household ritual into the holidays. We've replaced Friday's
pizza-and-movie night with songs and stories shared by the fireplace to
great effect. When December is a whirlwind of finding not only the
right gifts but also ways to afford them, while the kids watch
Christmas specials on television, I think the whole point of the season
is lost. The best gifts in any loving relationship are attention and
time. If there's one worthwhile thing to strive for this Christmas,
it's making more time together as a family. It's got to be relaxed
time, though. Read a good book aloud, or tell embarrassing family
anecdotes. This moment in time -- when your kids are this age -- is precious and
will never come again.
To this end, and to kill several birds with the proverbial stone, we're
making Christmas gifts together. Spending a few dollars on art
supplies like air-drying or oven-fireable clay goes a long way in this
regard. Your child may not be Rodin, but the earnest energy with which
they mold and shape makes for unique and heartfelt gifts. Three-year-old Hugh naturally assumes that dinosaurs are an ideal gift for anyone,
and also loves to bake, so maybe we'll whip up a few baskets of dino
gingerbread cookies. Keefe is a lot more sophisticated and pondered
hard over what subjects were dear to people before making a bunch of
drawings last year. Granted, there's enough people on our shopping
list that we can't do this for all of them. It's also a downside of
having a huge social circle that the holidays are a scheduling
nightmare and you can't make time for anything deeply involved with
anyone, but call me a Grinch if I suggest trimming the guest list.
Start giving stuff now maybe, if you've planned ahead, and expect to be
booked until early February, in time to reacquaint with your spouse
over Valentine's day.
I'm having a lot of fun making gifts for the family myself. This is
where technology and my iMac help shape my influence as a dad. Through the wonders
of my digital camera, photo editing software, and the Internet, I can
credibly insert Hugh into a T-Rex dig in Montana, beside his hero Jack
Horner, the curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies.
Since Keefe's been so thoroughly into Spider Man lately, we made up an
origin story together for a knockoff character, the Dark Spider, who
got an emergency blood transfusion from old Spidey when they were
snowbound together, and I'm cheating together some artwork so Keefe can
swing through our local cityscape in a picture. Some iron-on paper for
my printer, and voila: t-shirts, underwear, or whatever that'll rock
their world for under twenty bucks, and replaceable when Keefe loses
them. Finally, Jan gets a new pair of earrings made from this cool
material called Shrinky Dinks, a kind of textured plastic you color
with pencil crayons and which shrinks down and hardens in your oven,
making durable art that looks super detailed. Best of all, you don't
need drawing skills to use it: it's transparent, so you can just trace.
For Mother's Day I made earrings that were portraits of the boys'
faces, and this time it's little maps of the globe. They're a
replacement for another pair I gave her once which got lost, and it
means I can use the same cheesy line in the card a second time: "See, I
really can give you the world!"
If all of the above sounds like way too much effort, and you're sleep
deprived as it is, please don't mistake my point. You don't need to
spend yourself deeply into debt to make the holiday special, no matter
how many times we hear that it's our duty to boost the economy. You
also don't have to jump through creative hoops like the ones I've set
for myself in writing all of this down. What really touches somebody
at Yule time, or any time, is someone who knows them well demonstrating
it, and making some time for them. Put in an hour less overtime and
make a loved one a nice meal instead. Play a tickling game or blow
bubbles in your kitchen or get some fresh air together. Maybe like me
you'll feel it was well worth it, and have a couple of bucks left over.
I hope to be able to give some to a reputable charity, where some
single mom whose kid feels left out like I once did will have much
greater need for it than some Wal-Mart stockholder. Happy holidays.
_______________
Michael Nabert is a Canadian writer who loves to talk and sing, and writes mainly about
parenting, the art of wooing and paleontology. Widely traveled, with an opinion about everything, his friends often describe him as having
"a
deplorable excess of character." He is currently stay-at-home dad to Hugh
(3) and Keefe (9). Send feedback for Michael to: poprocks@austinmama.com
