The Christmas Quandary
By Tiffany Lewis

When I was little, I coveted one toy more than any other: a driveable, kid-sized car.  I would daydream about zipping through my neighborhood, side ponytail whipping in the breeze, while I waved at the neighbor kids from behind the wheel of my pink convertible.

That day never came, but I see myself again every time we go to our local thrift store and my son climbs behind the wheel of the kid-sized jeep, looking with longing at the real engine, the brake, the rearview mirrors.  He wants that jeep, his jeep. I check the price tag: $30.  I have no idea if it runs.  Really, we could get it if we wanted.

And yet, there’s something that holds me back.

Before I became a mother (i.e. when I thought I knew everything), I looked with disgust at parents who stocked their kids’ playroom like a toy store.  I had strong opinions that being deprived was good for children.

Then of course I had kids, and suddenly it was my child sitting in the Target toy aisle for thirty minutes, caressing the Tonka Town play set.  And I found myself doing the justification in my head: It’s only one play set, seven dollars.  We’ll eat bread and frozen peas for a week.  Think of his face when he opens up the package and runs those little trucks along the play mat.

And so, the great confession.  I want my kids to have the Thomas the Train table, every Dr. Seuss book ever written, the kitchen set, the bike that converts to a scooter, the tool set, the little play house in the back yard, and the Harry Potter Lego set.  I could happily dump the whole lot at my kids’ feet, just to see the excitement on their faces.

But I think I’d regret it. Because I still believe, though I don’t always act on this feeling, that less is better for children.

I like to think my strength of character comes partially from the Christmas gifts I received growing up: the no-name generic Cabbage Patch in a plastic bag, the board game with half the pieces missing, the mauve jewelry box with a giant rip across the top, and the scratched-up old bureau.

I didn’t know at the time that these gifts came straight off the discount rack at Goodwill.  They were my treasures.  Now that I’m a mother, I want to keep the same kind of second-hand simplicity under our Christmas tree.  But it’s amazing how quickly children pick up on the commercialism of Christmas.  Our house has four manger scenes and no graven images of Santa Claus, but when my husband asked our 2-year-old what Christmas is for, he replied confidently, “Santa brings us presents!”  Where did I go wrong?

Every year there is the collective bemoaning of the commercialism of Christmas.  I thought this was uniquely Christian, until last year when I spotted an ad in the newspaper.  It was for a Hanukkah celebration, and featured a picture of a garish-looking rabbi wielding a brightly lit menorah.  “Come join Rabbi Yabbinowitz for a Hanukkah spectacular!” the ad screamed.  “Presents, music, food for all the children!”

When I told a Jewish friend about it, she shook her head and said, “The fact that you even know about Hanukkah is a sign of its commercialism.  It’s not even one of our major holidays.”  So it is not just Christmas.  It is society, consumerism at large, trying to pull our kids in from every corner, snatch them up for a buck-a-piece, free cookies included.

Which leads to the real Christmas quandary.  How can we put a buffer between our children and the clutches of things?  How can we help preserve innocence, the kind that makes kids light up when they see a sparkling Christmas tree or cradle a baby Jesus in their palm?

My older son sometimes cries out in the night, “I want to be cozy!”  I stumble in and pull the blankets up around his chin and tuck them under his legs.  Then he drifts back to sleep.  I want to keep him there as long as possible, in that safe haven, away from Saturday morning cartoons, the Disney fiefdom, Xbox, MTV, bullies on the playground, and that sense of entitlement kids seem to heft upon their parents nowadays.

I have this running daydream in my head of truly escaping the world, of junking everything except my books – OK, and maybe my food processor – and moving to the country, where we eat off tin plates real, wholesome things like garden green beans, fresh-churned butter, and ripe ears of corn.  We’d eliminate everything plastic and the kids would fashion cars out of firewood scraps.  I’d bake bread, wear calico, pull my hair in a bun, and stop wearing mascara.  The kids would run barefoot and dig and muddy themselves up the way kids are supposed to.  We’d chop our own Christmas tree from our acres of wooded land.  At night, truly exhausted from a day’s real labor, we’d sit by candlelight and read Tennyson, Bronte, and Twain.  And my husband ... well, my husband would last about a day in the country before demanding his computer, his iPAQ, his New York Times, and his electric razor.  I married a man of the modern age.

And we live in a modern age.  We are not Amish.  So the country thing will never work.  We’ll have to be content with our plastic world and structured park down the road, and learn to retreat from consumerism in some other way.

Because someday my son will learn that he can pull up his own covers in the middle of the night and I will no longer be the center of his universe.  He’ll discover that there’s a vast television empire beyond BYU football.  He’ll petrify his brain with a Game Boy and wear baggy pants and oversized white sneakers.

But I will still love him, because he is my son, and so through it all I will continue to remind him that candy canes symbolize more than sugar in our teeth.  That Christmas trees are green for a reason.  That every sacred song we sing during this wonderful time was inspired by angels above.  That gifts, too, are a symbol of something far greater.  That when we rise on the “Hallelujah Chorus,” we are giving tribute to a king who long ago gave tribute to the King of Kings.  I will continue to tell my little boys, still babes themselves, of a God who was humble enough to come down as a babe and grow to maturity.  And I will teach that the real purpose of Christmas is, as the poet T.S. Eliot once wrote, “Because the beginning … remind[s] us of the end/ And the first coming of the second coming.”

Last week, while we walked home from the park, my son spied one of those plastic manger scenes in someone’s front yard. “I want to touch them,” he insisted. I hesitated, then unbuckled him from the stroller. He tiptoed into the yard, paused for a reverent moment, then proceeded to give the shepherds, the wise men, Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus each a sound kiss on the forehead. Even Santa doesn’t get that kind of treatment. I think my little boy will be just fine after all.