spark

claus-ing a commotion

"So, Reese, what is Santa going to bring you?" asks the boys' hairstylist, two and a half boys through our visit to her salon and struggling for small talk.  Reese is silent.  I shift in my seat, lean forward to explain the pause in conversation...but then, decide to wait. 

The stylist clips around one ear, swivels the chair around, continues around his other ear.  Reese is now facing me and I can see his eyes in his slightly-lowered face.  His brows are drawn in thought.  He casts a sideways look.

"Um, Kim?  Santa isn't real.  He's just a guy in a costume."

Again, I wait for the reaction.  Kim widens her eyes, chuckles briefly in surprise, but doesn't know what to make of what Reese has just said, and lapses back into silence.  

Relieved that at least his proclamation wasn't made in the presence of anybody his own age, I quoted him on Facebook...and was almost immediately informed that actually, he has spread the truthy word to his own age group.  In a mall play area.  At the top of his lungs.  And oh yeah, his brother broke the news to a younger friend last year.  Fortunately for my friendship with her parents, she didn't buy it.  

Well, shit.  This is the stuff people raise their eyebrows and ask about when they find out that your family doesn't "do" Santa.  What will you do when your kid almost inevitably spills the beans to some other kid?  After all, as a non-believer he is a minority in a vast, Christmas-celebratin', Santa-believin' world. And since he's a minority, most people are going to assume that he celebrates Christmas (which we do) and believes in Santa (which we don't), thereby ensuring that at some point (or two or three or ten) he is going to be stuck in a sticky situation, having to respond to a statement or query that slams together his own world view with his somewhat-less-than-fully-developed social skills.   

Fortunately for me, so far there hasn't been any major fallout from Reese and Griffin's Clausian indiscretions.  These exchanges carry the potential of getting hairy for both kids and parents, though, as in the case of a friend of mine who also has a no-nonsense son named Reese.  Last year, her Reese informed a neighborhood friend about Santa's non-existence.  From his point of view, he was providing information that he believed to be accurate to a friend who had just said something apparently inaccurate. This is typical, even healthy, for early elementary kids. They're learning about fact and fiction, about how to navigate the social intricacies of correcting people who are mistaken.  The problem is, when you correct a friend about Santa, the friend can end up confused and distressed, and his parent can end up frustrated and angry - angry at the child who spilled the beans, and angry at the parent who raised him.  In this case, the other child's parent requested that the boys be kept apart for a month, until Christmas had passed.  Ouch.  

How do we avoid these situations?  Some of what my family does:

• celebrate our own annual traditions and talk about how they developed
• read about world religions, seasons, holidays, and traditions
• talk about what traditions our friends celebrate
• encourage compassionate ways of handling conflict/disagreement
• discuss why friends might believe the things they do, and why we believe the things we do
• consider how sensitive words like "lie," "game", and "pretend" can be to our friends who incorporate Santa in their holiday traditions
• make time to discuss sticky situations that arise
• think about ways to be true to ourselves without hurting other people's feelings

Of course, proactive parenting and tolerance training can only go so far.  As one friend put it, once a child has information, the adult no longer controls that information.  I can share my perspective with a child and try to hand him some tools, but ultimately, he has social skills and an understanding of the world that are filtered through his own cognitive abilities.  Even assuming we could "perfectly" parent a five-year-old, he's still five.  A five-year-old is a stickler for accuracy. If his friend says the sky is green, he's probably going to inform him it's blue.  If somebody misidentifies a dinosaur, you can bet he'll be quick to provide the correct name. And when that friend says that only kids who believe in Santa get presents, he's going to tell him that Santa isn't real.  It's his truth. 

Even once a kid gets old enough to understand that it's probably not a good idea to correct his friends that way, he's still going to be mulling this stuff over. Griff came to me this evening and asked, "why do some parents lie to their kids about Santa?"  Now, I know and you know that many parents do not consider Santa to be a lie, or they consider it a white lie, and this whole truth-or-lie topic is not at all what I want to get into here.  If you want to dig into that topic, read and comment on last year's post.  For the purposes of this post, consider this: many second-graders believe that a man who lives at the North Pole flies around the world in a sleigh and makes gift deliveries at their house and the homes of other children.  They don't believe this in a metaphorical, spirit-of-giving way.  They believe it in a very straightforward way.  And Griff knows that the gifts that appear (wonderously! overnight! how does it work?) under our tree were purchased or made by his family members. So to his almost-eight-year-old mind, telling a kid that Santa put it there - or setting things up so that a kid will form that conclusion on his or her own - is a lie.  And he doesn't understand why a family might do that.

So I gave him some context.  Those parents?  They probably believed in Santa when they were kids.  And they enjoyed it, and eventually figured out what was going on, and still loved the tradition, and when they had kids they wanted to give them just the same kind of feelings and memories.  And adults sometimes feel like childhood is full of more imagination and wonder and mystery than adulthood is, and they want to enhance that, and watch their kids experience that kind of trusting belief.  

He asked me: did my family do that?  I explained that no, my mom had a traumatic Santa experience, so she didn't continue that tradition, and because of that, my happy childhood Christmas memories aren't combined with Santa. Dan's family does have lots of great stories about the "evidence" left by Santa and when I met him, there were still gifts "from Santa" under their tree, but when our children were born, he decided that all those good feelings didn't rely specifically upon Santa, but upon the inherent joy of families sharing happy times and traditions together.  So we chose not to do it.  I asked Griff and Reese if they wished we did.  They both said no.  And if my experience is any indication, they mean it, and they won't ever feel "deprived" as so many people assume (yes, people say this to me!).  

I think the childhood-memories piece is, perhaps, the key to bridging the gap between Santa and non-Santa families.  We're each pursuing our own vision of a comfy, cozy, magical, wonderful, inspirational time.  Our ideas of how to do that hinge upon our own childhood experiences.  Most of us cherish the intangible "Holiday Spirit" of love and giving.  Some of us call it Santa. Some of us don't.  If we understand this, can it take some - maybe even most - of the angst out of five-year-old confrontations over Saint Nick?

I've told you some of what my family does, and I'd also like to share my hopes for how all adults would approach these issues, especially during this time of year:

• discuss the many things people believe and the ways they worship/celebrate
• assume that people you meet probably don't do things the way you do - they may celebrate a different holiday or no holiday at all.  They may include the same traditions as you or different ones.  
• think of small talk topics that don't center around Santa (I cannot tell you how many grocery store clerks ask my kids about Santa every year - and every time I wonder if it will be the time the kids loudly spoil the Santa Secret for every other kid in the store).
• talk about why your family chose your traditions, and also about why other families might have chosen their traditions.  
• please don't teach children that only good kids get presents, or only kids who believe...it's just not true
• please don't assume that children who don't celebrate the same way yours do are deprived or that their parents are devoid of imagination and a sense of whimsy (yes, people assume this about me, and it sucks).
• please do realize that there are many ways of having "magic" in a holiday, that Santa is just one of those ways, and that there's no way to compare the amount of magic in one family versus another.

Do you have any proactive tips for Santa-lovin' or Santa-leavin' families?  How about advice for both kinds of families for those awkward moments when all the thoughtful, proactive parenting in the world goes out the window and a kid lets the cat out of the bag? Does each kind of family owe compassion to the other? How can they extend that compassion during a tricky moment?  

(And to parents of children who may have been at Short Pump Mall one afternoon two weeks ago...I'm really sorry if my dreamy, whimsical, but no-nonsense kid put a wrinkle in your holiday season, and hope it was only a very small blip in an otherwise joyful time.)

our place

Every family needs a place.

A fun place with a special thing you don't do anywhere else.

An inspiring place that strikes you in ways you can't explain, even to yourself.

A comfort food place where everybody gets just what they want.

A nostalgic place where you can look back and forward at the same time.

This is our place.  What is yours? 

word of the day 93/365: whim

boiled: 24 white eggs + 4 brown eggs
cracked: 11 white eggs
dyed: 19 whole or only-barely-cracked eggs
we've got a lot of eggs to eat

...and in not-entirely-unrelated news, I only just discovered that the correct lyrics at the end of the Jefferson Airplane song are "feed your head," and not "treacle-head," as I had been singing for, oh, let's say 25-30 years.  In my defense, "feed your head" isn't in the Louis Carrol books to my knowledge, and the dormouse does talk about treacle.  To my detriment, I thought for the first 10 years or so that treacle was related to excrement, perhaps because I couldn't imagine anything but water or sewage in a well, and thought living in a treacle well sounded like a horrible thing, and not appropriate tea party conversation at all.  Back in my defense, it would certainly explain why poor Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie were so very ill.   Living on treacle.  Pity. 

More whimsicle fuckery: I am, or at least was, a Peep purist.  WTF is a Peep purist, you ask? So glad you did.  A Peep purist is a person (I'm the only one I know but I'm sure there are others like me out there) who will only buy the classic yellow chick Peeps during the spring.  No marshmallow snowmen, no out-of-season chicks, no sugar-dusted hearts or jack-o-lanterns, and absolutely, positively, NO bunnies or those horrid neon blue, purple, pink, orange, or green chicks they have nowadays.  A travesty, I tell you.  Classic. Yellow. Chicks.  Or nothing. 

So, it turns out that a Peep purist should not go shopping with three young children if she would like to leave the store with her Easter candy principles intact.  I reached for one package of Peeps (I will not call any of the other imposters by that name), and left with two packages of yellow chicks, one package of purple chicks, one package of pink chicks, and - oh, Peeps, I'm so sorry - one package of green marshmallow bunnies.  I am a traitor to my own values.  What a treacle-head.

word of the day 54/365: anticipate

I wait for this all year, and in keeping with today's word, I'm gonna make you wait for the actual picture of the day, too. The one above is just a sweet teaser. Can you guess what it is?

:: My first memory of one is from when I was three.
:: They have a texture like nothing else.
:: I won't touch any of the spin-offs available the rest of the year.

The first one of the season entered the house today, and boy did I have fun playing with the way the sun sparkled on it. Give up? Wanna see the official picture of the day?

Griff also got something he was looking forward to today, but he gets to enjoy it on a much more regular basis:

word of the day 42/365: begin

the 'kroppers, originally uploaded by theloushe.

Me and three cute boys, beginning a shopping trip at local chain Ukrop's, which will soon become Giant-Carlisle stores (boo, hiss). We call this 'kropping. As in, I'm crazy to go 'kropping with two toddlers and a seven-year-old.

I was ultra-bummed when the Ukrop family decided to sell their stores to Giant.  For a few years, the prevailing rumor was that the younger Ukrops had no interest in continuing the family business, and that the stores would be sold to grocery chain Harris Teeter.  While HT lacks the locally-owned cache of Ukrops, they are, at least, a comparable chain in terms of the types of products they provide and the market they serve.  I mourned the loss of the awesome customer service but had faith that I would still be have a comparable shopping experience.

Well, then they went and sold to Giant.  Giant, who is really no different from Kroger, who is already established in the Richmond area.  Do we really need another grocery store of the same caliber?  When I want to shop at Kroger, I shop at Kroger.  I don't want the same thing across the street.  I want something between mainstream Kroger and small-and-expensive Ellwood Thompson's.  I want great produce and a variety of other fresh foods with excellent quality. I want a store with a large natural/organic foods section but that also has more conventional products.  I want top-notch customer service and somebody friendly to bag my groceries and carry them to my car when I'm frazzled with three kids hanging off of me. 

Rumor had it that the downsizing of employees had already begun, and that emphasis would be placed on more weekly specials and fewer specialty products. 

I'm felt betrayed by Ukrop's.  They have a huge loyal customer base, and this is how they trade us in?  I felt annoyed by Giant.  What do they think they purchased, and do they think they can keep the Ukrop's customer base if they get rid of everything the customers liked about the stores?  ('ll even miss the quaintness of the stores being closed on Sundays and having to go elsewhere for wine and beer. Not my value system, but I get it, I respect it, and it's part of what makes me feel like there are local PEOPLE behind the store. Plus, the empty Ukrop's lot on Sundays and planning your shopping accordingly is part of what makes Richmond Richmond.)

I'm slightly mollified after reading the Feb 8th release informing us that G-C has listened to customer concerns and will maintain the same feel to the stores.  The surname-ish "Martins" is a lot easier to swallow than the more big-box-store "Giant", and they say they're keeping the carry-out, but I'm still skeptical about what will actually be on the shelves.  It doesn't help that the Martins website is nearly identical to the Giant site.  Call me cautiously optimistic.  Or maybe pessimistic but willing to allow for a sliver of a chance that the stores 3 minutes away will still be acceptable to me and I won't have to drive 20 minutes to Whole Foods in Short Pump. 

At any rate, we're trying to enjoy our last 'kropping experiences while we can.  I like that Griff and I marked the beginning of this trip without thought that it's also close to the end.

word of the day 1/365: silly

My carefullly honed* super-scientific word-selection method** (CHSSWSM***) has determined that today's word is SILLY****. Eventually I had a mental image of this guy:

Feathers has lived with us for many a year. He is a master of clever disguise and concealment, and likes to lurk in places where we don't expect to find him. I have opened a suitcase on a business trip to discover that he stowed away with my suits. He has patiently waited for months in a storage locker before surprising me when I went to pick up my belongings. He has been unexpectedly found in showers, posing as a bottle of beer in a six-pack, on pantry shelves or in the fridge, inside bathrobe sleeves, in seldom-used drawers, under the covers of my bed, in my son's school backpack, waiting in a tool box...we never know where he'll show up or how long it will take us to discover his new hideout.

Have YOU seen this chicken?

(His arrest number is the code for a free iTunes Yo La Tengo song - I had an extra card and it expires today.  Go!)

* my seven-year-old developed it
** I picked it out of a clown hat
*** clever/pronounceable acronyms are highly overrated
**** word submitted by aforementioned seven-year-old

santaphobia

he sees you when you're sleeping, originally uploaded by theloushe.

I held my tongue for the whole Christmas season.  Now that we're safely on the other side of the holy day, I can safely blaspheme, right?

What is the deal with Santa? 

I grew up in a non-Santa-observant family.   My mother was horribly scarred by the way she found out "the truth" about the Jolly Old Saint. Not only did she feel betrayed and violated by her discovery, but then, to add insult to injury, she was punished for it.  So, yeah, you can bet she didn't tell any tales of the Claus to her own tykes. I grew up with other Christmas traditions, happy with our way of doing things, yet aware that parents in other families convinced their children through word or deed that some or all of the gifts under the tree were delivered by some mythical guy who may or may not enter your home through the chimney after arriving by reindeer-powered transportation.  To answer the inevitable questions/pities: no, I never envied them.  No, I never ever spoiled the secret for another child/family.  And no, I was not lacking an ounce of "magic" from my own holiday traditions. 

What is the hangup regarding this "magic" thing?  To believe that a family who doesn't follow the exact same tradition as other families lacks "magic" is, in my opinion, sorely lacking in imagination.  And really, imagination is what we're getting at here, right?  Whimsy, creativity, awe and wonder?  Yeah, you can have that in spades with or without Santa. This is not at all a dig at Santa believers, I don't doubt for a moment that their traditions are often fun and whimsical.  But can we just acknowledge that Santa's sleigh isn't the only way to travel to magical places? Surely human imagination isn't that limited!

While we're discussing sleighs: there is the issue of The Lie.  When my mother experienced her traumatic revelation, one key part of her experience was that she could not understand why her parents had lied to her.  They had led her to believe that the gifts were produced and delivered by Santa when, in fact, neither was true.  Years later, she didn't want to similarly mislead her own children, so she didn't tell what she believed to be a lie.  Now, I generally don't discuss The Lie with other families, because the word "lie" is very loaded. People feel defensive because we think of lies as something someone tells either out of malice or in an attempt to avoid getting in trouble.  Parents are hardly intending harm to their children when they lead them to believe in Father Christmas.  They're sharing a fun tradition that they enjoyed, and they're soaking up the wonder-by-proxy.  They admire the ability child to believe in what they can't see, and they love the fantasy of it.  Some even say that they're not telling a lie because they believe in Santa, in that each of us embodies the Spirit of Christmas, or that Santa lives in our hearts, and is, therefore, real. 

Now, folks, can we get real for a second here?  Those are lovely thoughts.  Lovely, really.  I'm totally down with all the Tidings of Comfort and Joy and Good Will Toward Men and such.  But honestly, regardless of what we're hoping our children will remember when they're 35 and reliving the holidays of their youth for the benefit of their own tots, right this moment the kids are little.  The concept of Santa is introduced to infants and toddlers.  They don't have the cognitive ability to grasp symbolism, they don't actively engage in that level of fantasy.  They hear stuff about Santa bringing them presents and they don't have any concept that Mom and Dad are representing something bigger and more timeless through their own acts of giving.  They think a guy from the North Pole is literally flying around the world for the express purpose of visiting their home to fill their stockings with his own two flesh-and-blood hands.  And this is what parents want them to believe while they're little, for the sake of both the present magic and the future nostalgic perpetuation of their family tradition.  Nobody is asking a two-year-old to deal in metaphor, and no three-year-old conjures up Kris Kringle without a little help from the people around her.  The kids aren't pretending, they are believing...and we have led them to that belief, knowing that the particulars of their faith don't quite match up to the physical realities of things.

There are all kinds of reasons why people tell lies, and some are little white lies and some are whoppers.  Can we all get over the defensiveness, and admit that every parent makes decisions all the time about whether to tell the whole truth, the abbreviated truth, a half-truth, the embellished truth, a metaphorical truth, or a complete flat-out non-truth?  It's totally up to you to decide whether or not to lie to your kids about anything, any time, and how much lying or embroidering of truth to do.  But own up to it, if you're purposefully leading them to believe something inside their heads that doesn't resemble cold hard fact, you're lying.  This isn't a value judgment.  Why the denial?

Back to those kids who aren't pretending, but who are having a genuine faith-based experience: I noticed something this year that hadn't occurred to me before.  Many kids are totally and completely skeeved out by Santa. One friend's child explicitly banned him from their house, frightened by the idea that this stranger might enter while he was sleeping.  My own four-year-old hadn't heard much about Santa until recently, when classmates and adults all around him were talking about various permutations of the myth. Suddenly he was asking us all kinds of questions.  His inner dialogue seemed to be something like this: "Oh my god, what the hell is this story I'm hearing from everybody?  There's a guy who breaks into houses on Christmas?  WHY? Is he for real? What will he do to me? Can he see me right now? How does he get into the house? Should we get some protection?"  The kid was really, really concerned.  He wanted reassurance from us that Santa was not real and would not be coming into our sacred family space uninvited.  

I started hearing more stories about children who are plagued by a sense of Santa stranger danger.  It seems most common in three and four-year-olds, who are often weighing heavy cognitive stuff like how illness and death work, worries about abduction, and fear of being separated from parents or getting lost.  Kids this age are also starting to be more able to tell their parents about bad dreams, and they work through a lot of anxieties in those dreams.  It can be a bit overwhelming for these kids, grappling with very real human fears, to be told that a stranger will enter their house after stalking them for months and recording their sins and virtues, and that furthermore, they should really love and trust this stranger, 'cause he gives you stuff.  You shouldn't trust strangers who offer you puppies or candy, but hey, climb up on this guy's lap so we can take your picture! (Have you seen the scared kids on the Sketchy Santas blog?)  Can you imagine how creepy it would be to be a kid, minding your own business, and then suddenly it seems like every adult in the world, from your teacher to your pediatrician to the grocery store clerk to little old ladies on the elevator, are all asking you if a guy you've never seen is going to sneak into your house? Yikes!

Can somebody explain any of this to me, in honest terms? Why is there so much derision for families who don't want to follow this tradition?  Why is there so much denial of the nature of the deceit (as touchy a word as "lie"), and how do we address the feelings of kids who are scared by the tradition that brings their parents and siblings joy?  Is there room for more than one way to celebrate, without either disparaging the parenting choices of the Santa lovers or pitying "deprived" children whose families tell other holiday tales?

No matter what form your magic takes and what inspires your holiday spirit, may all your days be merry and bright.

wordless wednesday

home for christmas

Almost twenty years ago, a family friend, who was also my confirmation sponsor, invited me over to make chocolate houses with her during winter break. I had never heard of a chocolate house but soon discovered something yummier and stickier than the traditional gingerbread house - slabs of molded chocolate sealed together with molten chocolate, with candies attached with yet more liquid chocolate "glue." Building houses together before Christmas became a tradition, and when I got married, she gave us a gorgeously detailed cast-iron mold.  Every few years I get my act together enough to make a chocolate house (generally to the delight of my father-in-law the chocoholic, who graciously volunteers to help dismantle it post-Christmas).  This year I shared the tradition with two other families - the adults assembled the houses and the kids decorated them with all sorts of amazing candies I found at a local chocolate shop.  Everybody had so much fun with it, and I'm hoping we can make it an annual (or nearly-annual) tradition.

Some tips for wannabe chocolate house architects:

♥ Stock up on plenty of melting chocolate.  For the walls and roof of this house plus a tree (for which I use a plastic mold), it takes about 7 bags of confectioner's chocolate.  You can find melt-and-pour chocolate at most craft stores.  Search online for plastic molds or follow the link above to purchase a cast iron pan.

♥ Never pour chocolate into a cold metal mold.  Ideally, you should mold chocolate in a warm room and the mold should be at or slightly above room temperature.  A cold mold will cause the chocolate to start setting as soon as you pour it, making it very difficult if not impossible to remove in one piece.  I discovered that I could quickly warm my iron mold on top of our gas range. 

♥ Fastest way to set chocolate: pop the mold into the freezer for 5-15 minutes.  Keep it level, of course.

♥ Cardboard cake rounds make an excellent base if you don't have a platter to spare or if you want to host a building party or give a house as a gift.

♥ Spoon melted chocolate onto the pieces to use as "glue" to assemble the house.  Fill any gaps with extra chocolate - you can cover anything unsightly with candies later.

♥ Plan to have extra candies, because chances are, you and your helpers won't be able to resist sampling them! 

♥ Other materials you might want to use: cake/cookie sprinkles, icing, mini marshmallows (great for building snowmen), powdered sugar for a dusting of "snow", animal crackers...anything sweet and cute is fair game.

♥ Jumbo rolls of cellophane can be found at the craft store and are useful for wrapping houses that are bound for somebody else's home sweet home.

on this night, let us light

On this night
let us light
one little candle fire.
'Tis a sight
burning bright
one little candle fire.

(ok, so we had four...one for each year we've had a child who brought one home from preschool to share during winter break)

Happy solstice, and may you stay warm on the longest night of the year.  We may have many cold days ahead of us, but it's nice to know that tomorrow the days start lengthening little by little again, and that before long the world will warm up and bloom!

While you wait for the spring, I recommend sharing the stories in The Return of the Light with your loved ones.  And for curious kids who want to understand winter's darkness, Sunshine Makes the Seasons is a nice, simple resource. After all, "axial tilt is the reason for the season!"