Merry Christmas and Good Luck Shopping to All!
The theology I find important about the "Christian reason for the season" is fairly simple:
1. There is nothing about our human nature, body, existence, whatever, that is incompatible with God.
2. Birth is miraculous.
Now that I've discovered that people are commenting on these (at times) and I should mark them as not being spam and read them, I noticed some interesting comments on the Santa Lies column.
I'm not sure I have a strategy for talking about G-d except to answer whatever questions arise totally honestly and seriously, which involves a fair amount of "I don't know." I happen to have fallen in with some Zen folk and am taking rather delightedly to the idea that in our relationship with G-d it doesn't matter very much what we think or believe; our thoughts are not what is important to G-d; indeed G-d's perspective on our thoughts is likely to be a rather unattached perspective.
So I have a few different tactics when talking to the kids:
1. What is important is how we act, not what we think.
2. Stories can be important without being true in a literal sense, because they show us things about people. (We do have various books of bible stories for toddlers, which we do read (with a bit of tweaking from the reader to improve the implicit theology)). We also read books of folktales and Greek mythology (and Buddhist tales as well), and identify the bible stories as being more historical or more like the myths that our community uses to illuminate the world.
3. G-d is never ever apart from us, not for one second.
4. Worshiping in a community is an opportunity. At our church, anyone may receive the bread and wine, and both kids seems to accept this offering without necessarily liking the more boring bits of the liturgy. The kids would still rather stay home than attend, but they will as adults have the ability to hear a liturgy they've heard since the very beginning. If they become Unitarians anyways, that's fine.
I just read a lovely post by Stephanie about the end of her son's Santa Claus belief, and was inspired to share my own hard boiled policy.
One of my earliest memories of betrayal was arguing with a boy in kindergarten about the reality of Santa Clause. As a faithful Episcopalian, I went to the mat, as kindergarten arguments go, for his reality. I went home, and described the debate to my mom, who let me in on the truth: I had been lied to, by my parents and by society. Arg. It is mere coincidence that I did not at that moment abandon all belief in goodness.
So when my beloved life partner and I started with kids, having a skeptical child has more or less been a deliberate goal. I used to play games where I'd say silly untrue things to my daughter (very difficult to hit the right level, so that she was neither completely believing what I was saying nor angry that it wasn't true). Also, I have a strange speech habit where I substitute one word for another without even really noticing it. For example, I often say "blanket" instead of "towel", which to me are closely related concepts anyways, but my daughter is always correcting me. So she has years of experience with having her authority be fallible. And I also try as much as I am able to not lie outright to her, about anything, and to answer any question she has. I'll omit much of relevance, of course, but that's how it goes with parents.
But she never had a year when she understood what the Santa thing was about, and was told that it was literally real. Not that she hasn't enjoyed setting out food for Santa and writing notes. The policy has worked out better than I'd have guessed, as she is both informed and also able to enjoy the magical mythical aspects fully (and I have said that Santa is a story that people love because it shows the wonder of giving and receiving). Of course, this is a person who can spend hours playing games with her tiny tiny dolls. She'll be playing with them as I re-tidy the kitchen or whatever, and I'll here a faint, "Daddy" from where she is sitting, and I'll say "Yes?" And she'll say "I'm not talking to you!" with some exasperation. It is tiny doll #1 talking to tiny doll #2.
The thing I can't decide about is my son. He's just three, and someone has been telling him the stories about Santa. He's not as skeptical as my daughter was. (People over hear my daughter and I negotiating on some point or other, and they often tell me she'll be a fine lawyer.) I do play the games about joking, and he's a big joker, but he's just got a certain willingness to believe in wild stuff that she didn't have. So I'm finding myself wondering if I should bring up Santa's factualness if it doesn't come up spontaneously. It seems like that would be a spoil sport thing to do, but then I don't want to get into keeping the truth from him, to the extent that he even cares about the truth.
For he, at three, isn't really even in the "reality based community" yet. You can't find out what happened in a literal sense by asking him (which makes for some interesting occasions when he and his sister have fought in ways that sound like the rules of fighting were violated, and he's clearly not answering factually, and yet just my asking him what happened seems to be an essential part of a just environment; so I'll be like, "What happened?" to him, and his sister will try to quickly tell me her side of it, and I'll say, "I'm not asking you, I want to hear from him." And he'll make up some wildly improbable story, and then what can I do? "Is this fight so serious that we need to get out of the bathtub? [No!] If I have to help out once more, then we are getting out."
So does he care about Santa? Will he be arguing with someone about Santa's reality and be upset if he was tricked? And will my friends that are protecting their kids' ideas about Santa Claus be horrified by this post?
I expected that having kids would make me vastly more sentimental. I've always been pretty sentimental (and I am much more likely to cry at tire commercials or funny you tube videos) since having kids.
However, in fact, I recycle art and drawings with a light heart. The reason sentimentality can't overwhelm one as a parent is that the kids you love keep disappearing. I sat next to a 6 month old baby recently, all proud with her sitting up and ability to reach out and touch things. I remember enjoying that time, but I haven't had a baby in the house in some time. What I loved about my six month old was gone and replaced with things to love about an aspiring crawler, which was replaced by the cool dangerousness of an accomplished crawler, which rapidly disappeared into a walker, ... and so on.
I find that if I just stack all the art up in a box (after taking it off of the wall) and waiting a while, I am no longer so interested in the art - the artist has moved onto such new and complex stuff in the meanwhile, that I can take a few representative samples and drop the rest into the paper stream. Recycle these splashes of color? Why, haven't you seen the latest picture with circles and lines in it? Seen that subtle commentary on our family complete with some of our lovely birds that live in the bushes?
I loved my 5 year old but she is gone, gone, gone away. Currently we have a seven year old sharing her wit and wisdom. I've been in many conversations about whether it's the "Terrible Twos" or the "Terrible Threes," but in fact I don't really see what a stage is like until it's disappearing already. Aside from the fact that it doesn't make anything easier to think "I really like this about three year olds" or "I don't like this about three year olds," the change is just so constant that with only two kids you never can really know if there is a difference between stages or between your two individual kids or between their genders or whatever. As my second child goes through the same number of years of life that his sister went through before, I find that my seeing of his life often has an implicit comparison to it, while his big sister continues her push through the edge of my parenting experience and skill.
I don't even know if my kids have a favorite breakfast, much less what it is. I give them a choice each morning from the standard and currently available breakfasts (despite a dietitian's instruction that a special distinct cuisine for breakfast is a bizarre modern innovation, we stick with toast/eggs/cereal/oatmeal/pancakes and keep the sandwiches/pasta/candy for later). But I'm often surprised by what they choose. They'll have only oatmeal for months but then spend a week back at eggs, then have a week with different things each day, including oatmeal. This year is the first that my three year old is venturing to ask for different food than his big sister (he's always actually eaten different stuff, but he used to loyally ask for the same as her). The choices change, but I'm not sure what they change with. I can only hope that hunger has something to do with it.
I do get funny stares when we travel and people ask me "What is their favorite breakfast" and I have no reasonable answer. They seem to assume that as a stay at home parent, I should know their favorite breakfast. Can I start to deconstruct the notion of "favorite breakfast" as though this question is a good opportunity for some philosophy? Should I share the ocean of observations I have, and how I'm not sure the question has a permanent answer? Should I just immediately ask the kids what they want? Ask the host what the choices are?
What they want is unique to each situation, and how they are is constantly changing; my adult stiffness and ostensible "favorites" have to stretch constantly to keep up, or I find myself trying to insist that we do something again that was fun four months ago; "What do you mean, you don't want to go to the underdog park?". Not that I don't know that a back-hoe will always delight my son and a horse will always delight my daughter and that a trip to the potomac for catching fish will please us all. But no doubt in a year or two that'll have changed as well. I wonder what it will be like to have loved all these different people by the time they are 18. I smile wistfully when I see a baby, but I find myself so fascinated by my son's current burst of linguistic growth that I don't miss his old self when I am with his current reality.
When each of my kids started pre-school, there was a phenomenon that I found surprising. They started to get sick. A lot.
My fellow blogger and physical acquaintance (been missing the drama classes, I must say) Stephanie has "tagged" me with a "meme." These are blog-speak for "chain letter with interesting sequelae" but it's the first time this happened to me, so I'm game.
Rules
1. Link to the person that tagged you and post the rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 random and or weird things about yourself.
3. Tag 7 random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.
4. Let each person know that they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
I probably can't come up with 7 random people, but I can find 7 blogs I have on my bookmark bar.
My wife has been a politician until last week, so my sample will be biased towards the ok to talk about in public.
1. Simon Donaldson once said I had a good proof.
2. I personally helped to design and implement a feature to a software product that was excoriated on comp.risks (sending one's forgotten password unencrypted in an email to an AIM user that forgot their password).
3. The foreign languages I've studied in school (and once could read at least as well as a first grader in that land) were Attic Greek, Classic Latin, and Old English.
4. The live musical experience of my life that I'd say was the most mind-blowing was the World Saxophone Quartet. They managed a density of amazing musical complexity that rivals a good six part fugue, and were cool to boot.
5. I am secretly pleased when my daughter gets the same criticism in school that I got (slow in the early grades, and had to take remedial PE in first grade). I try hard to not be convinced that this means she is fated for scholastic greatness.
6. My high school (where I learned that money and happiness are effectively unrelated) was mentioned by name in the Preppy Handbook of the 1980s.
7. When I turned 30, I shaved my head bald. I just turned 40 last Friday and I may well do it again.
Blogs I'm reading:
Hard Core Zen
Hurricane blog at wunderground
These are all big established blogs that have never heard of me and would be annoyed if I tagged them, so I won't be mentioning it to anyone.
Recently something I've been afraid of for sometime occurred: someone posted a crime report onto the Takoma Pakk parenting list serv. I've been expecting this action for sometime, so I was ready with my essay with why parents should not worry about crime reports.
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