The Christmas Shopping Post

The turkey and its stuffing are gone. It it snowing and blowing and the cars are sliding down the hill and into the ditch in front of the Kingdom Hall. The news anchors are keeping us breathlessly posted on the progress of "Black Friday" and "Cyber Monday", much as they kept us breathlessly updated on each wave of toy recalls a few weeks ago.

I was thinking that I was glad that I didn't have any little kids who were writing letters to Santa, requesting the latest in TV advertised trash. I asked some of the people at work what they were doing about toys for kids this year. "Well, I guess we'll just buy some toys, let them lick 'em, and see if they pass out," was one response. Another said: "Blocks. Can't go wrong with plain wooden blocks."

I realized that I had always struggled to fight the toy advertisers. I had, in fact, perfected a whole folklore about Santa and toy advertising, first published here two years ago. It went something like this:

The toys you see on TV are not really good toys. In the commercials they look like fun toys, but those kids aren't really playing. Those kids are actors and they are just pretending to have fun. Sometimes they are really good actors so the toys look like they're amazing --but if you get those toys they don't do what the commercial made it look like they do. The plane doesn't really fly. The doll doesn't really eat. They break, or the batteries run down, or there are so many pieces that it takes longer to clean up than it does to play.

Santa only brings toys that are going to be fun for a long time. He doesn't like toys that break or get their pieces lost. He likes to bring toys that can be whatever you need to pretend. He likes sturdy toys, and books that are good enough to read over and over. The people that make TV toys have to spend so much money to make those commercials that they don't have enough money left to make really good toys; that's why Santa won't put those toys in his sleigh.

It was a nicer world when the worst thing a toy could do was break or be boring. These days we have to look at toys as potential poison or potential recalls. Many of my coworkers are turning to electronics in their quest for safe toys. This scares me, too, as the "edutainment" of younger and younger children is a huge uncontrolled experiment on developing brains.

Over the years I have sought to replace seasonal shopping with other experiences. Music has played a huge part, as we devote a good deal of time to preparing for the Leelanau Childrens Choir concerts, as well as church services. The girls like to organize informal carolling parties, as well, using the holidays as an excuse to walk around the neighborhoods at night, maybe accepting a cookie or two.

We also cook a lot, making batch after batch of cookies, pies and sweetbreads. We also put together batches of oatmeal cookie mix and homemade baking mix, to give as presents. We sew polar fleece hats and mittens, make catnip toys, build birdhouses. When my kids talked about what they wanted to get for Christmas, I always asked them about the gifts they hoped to give.

Somehow, it all worked. Anna was one of the last kids in her class to give up the idea of Santa. Despite buying less and less, we seemed to have an abundance that convinced her. "There must be a Santa," she told me last year, "because you and Dad couldn't possibly afford everything that we have."

Courageous Caroline

Last summer we had one of those community dramas that is a little too personal to blog about. One of our friends, Shelagh and Liz's high school physics teacher, had a young daughter who was diagnosed with a brain tumor. In very short order she was flown to Ann Arbor, readied for surgery, and the tumor, mildly malignant, was removed with seemingly no lasting effects. Of course it was not quite so simple at the time, it was scary.

This story in the Lansing State Journal tells of a girl about the same age, also with a brain tumor, who has never had it so easy. Her trials started at birth, when she was born to an addict, already hooked on crack cocaine. Her adoptive parents are the sort of people that we all need to think of when we think that parenting is too hard, or we start to feel overly proud of our parenting. I can't hold a candle to these folks.

Maybe I'm a Pirate

Last Tuesday was National Talk Like a Pirate Day. I made sure to let the dice crew know about it last night, except that I changed it to Talk Like a Pirate Week.

Rob was ecstatic. "You mean we can talk like pirates all week?"

They don't call iit a dice crew for nuthin. They immediately started calling Harghhhd sixes and pieces of eight. And telling the old joke that ends "First day with me hook."

Anyway, I was inspired to check out the Talk Like a Pirate website, where I found a link to Mad Sally's account of her appearance on the TV show Wife Swap. This is the show where they take two very different families and switch the moms for a week. Although the title makes it sound like there's sex involved, there isn't. It's all about how moms set the values and goals of a household and what happens when you substitute another set of goals and values.

I would love to quote Mad Sally right here, but her piece is copyrighted. So read it here. I'm with Sally: to hell with housework, let's live life.

The Good Enough Parent

One of the best books I've read on child rearing was The Good Enough Parent by Bruno Bettelheim. This is from the introduction:

In order to raise a child well, one ought not to try to be a perfect parent, as much as one should not expect one's child to be, or to become, a perfect individual. Perfection is not within the grasp of ordinary human beings. Efforts to attain it typically interfere with that lenient response to the imperfections of others, including those of one's child, which also make good human relations possible.

But it is quite possible to be a good enough parent -- that is, a parent who raises his child well. To achieve this, the mistakes we make in rearing our child -- errors often made just because of the intensity of our emotional involvement in and with our child, -- must be more than overcompensated for by the many instances in which we do right by our child.

The book never was widely read, probably because it was not an easily read how-to book, but an invitation to look at a child's world from the child's point of view and to remember one's own childhood to discover what hidden agendas we bring to the world of parenting.

I'm thinking of this book after pondering the "Mommy Madness" articles. My siblings and I are also trading anecdotes in preparation for our parents' 50th wedding anniversary. It is quite fashionable nowadays to find a few flaws in one's upbringing and attribute all sorts of psychic harm to one's childhood trauma. Maybe that's what makes those Mommies so crazy. They have become accustomed to pursuing and achieving perfection, they fell that less than perfect parenting will ruin their kids, yet there is no such thing in parenting.

Working on an Indian reservation gives me a totally different perspective. The lucky rez families have stayed intact through the generations, but many families are still rebuilding after generations of alcohol abuse, poverty, and the old practice of forcibly separating kids from their families in an attempt to make the kids "less Indian".

I work with some people who suffered through abysmal childhoods, but they are determined to do better by their kids. They have forgiven their parents and are even caring for those parents who forgot to care for them. I know that when I get really stressed with my kids I blurt out the same things my mom said to me, and I'm thankful that my "inner soundtrack" is reasonably sane. My friends who were raised in foster homes and orphanages, my friends whose parents were literally never sober, these people are inventing parenthood from scratch. I am in awe of their bravery and dedication as they forge through what is, to them, uncharted territory.