Celebrations have always been important in my family. I’ve always believed they’re part of healthy child development and, no matter how humbled I’ve felt by other aspects of parenting, I’ve taken pride in our ability to create and sustain meaningful traditions.
The success we’ve had in this area hit home a few weeks ago when I was talking to my youngest child, who is almost 14. She was telling me about a new friend whose family is from Korea. This friend asked my daughter what Christmas at our house is like and my daughter happily told her.
Christmas in our family starts on December 1. Actually, for my husband and I it starts a few days earlier, when we buy little Advent gifts. You see, when our older children were small, they had many food-related health issues and we couldn’t just buy those ready-made Advent calendars with chocolates. One year, I saw an idea in a craft book for making tiny parcels with a few morsels of candy in each and hanging them all by coloured ribbons from a big, red bow. It’s a lovely decoration, it allowed me to choose candies they could eat, and it was fun for them to get up every day of December, open each little parcel, and share the sweet treasures inside — before breakfast, no less!
Once the Advent calendar is up, it’s time to make Christmas cards. One year when our two older kids were little, I had the idea to cut up cards we’d received the previous year and make new cards out of them by pasting them together in little collages. Over the years, my older kids outgrew this tradition and it is now a mommy-and-me activity with my youngest. We’re getting pretty good at it — especially my daughter. Her designs this year took the concept to a whole new level. I joked with her about making a business out of it, but I wasn’t entirely kidding. Some of her cards are small works of art, and the time we spent together considering how best to pair this landscape with that combination of santas — priceless.
Sometime after December 15, the tree goes up. It’s not a designer tree; most of the decorations are unique and bring back specific memories. In particular, every year since my kids were small, my best friend has sent each of them a decoration that represents some aspect of their lives that year — a tiny singer for when one daughter was in choir, a little chef because the other daughter loves to cook, a guitar from when my son was in a rock band. And then there’s the white dove that goes atop the tree. No star or angel for our secular tree, just a dove as a symbol of our hope for peace on earth.
I could go on and on — and I’m sure in talking about our Christmas to her Korean friend, my daughter did. She told me that when she was done, her friend looked at her and said, “It sounds like something out of a book.” I’ve never thought of it that way, but I guess to someone looking in on it from outside, it must seem like that.
Before I had children, I had a lot of story-bookish ideas about the kind of parent I wanted to be. Suffice to say, I’m not that parent. And if there are times in our family life that are like a story, there are also times that I really don’t feel like making another Advent calendar or more Christmas cards, and that I’d like to have a designer tree someday.
But if the celebrations that mark the turning of the pages of our lives are good enough that our children can’t wait for them to come around again, and are happy to tell their friends about them, then I think we have done something very, very right — and not only for our children. I think as parents, it’s really important to cherish those moments of celebration when everyone was smiling and all was right with the world. Because it’s in those moments that we know that, no matter how often we have felt and will again feel truly humbled by the challenges of parenting, there are also times when we’ve managed to make our family life storybook perfect, after all.