christmas freaks

As it turns out, we are Christmas freaks. No, not in the sense that we obsessively celebrate the season with boat loads of presents or a 50,000 light display, quite the opposite, really. We are Christmas freaks because we’ve never really made a big deal over Santa or the presents and don’t plan on it.

To be clear, our house is not a Santa-free zone. We just consider it a really fun story like Peter Pan or something. So we have a pretty little Christmas tree with all of the twinkling lights and ornaments and candy canes. And there are a few gifts underneath there but not that many. And it works for us but it's not what you’d call typical these days so by definition I guess that makes us freaks or as my sister lovingly calls us, The Murderers of Christmas Fun.

I have to admit that being a Christmas freak is harder than it used to be. We’d read The Night Before Christmas and hang some Santa ornaments on the tree but by choice our main focus has always been Christ’s birth. It just seemed simpler that way. So Santa, for us, was always something fun but we pretty much left it at that. No problems whatsoever until November 30, the Monday after Thanksgiving which, unbeknownst to me, marked the reading of the first Santa book of the season at Seth’s preschool. The teacher cracked open the book with great joy and anticipation and my son, my pride and joy said, “Santa’s not real.” Fortunately, the other kids didn’t hear him but the teacher, who by all accounts is a lover of all things Christmas, most certainly did hear him and started to cry. It was then that Seth received a short lecture on how to preserve the magic of Christmas for the rest of the class and then he started to cry.

Talking it over later that afternoon, Seth and I agreed that every kid should be able to have fun with Santa and it would be really wrong of us to say something that would take that fun away. But all of it made me wonder for a moment if we’d done it all wrong, if Seth would be forever traumatized or filled with some deep sense of loss for having freakish parents who did not embrace Santa as a source of Christmas joy and fulfillment. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that no matter how crazy it seems to some people, Christmas for our family is centered on Christ and generosity. These messages are so easily drown out by want and commercialism that, for our family at least, it’s good to just simplify the focus.

So for me bumbling Christmas freak that I am, this Christmas season has taught me some really valuable new lessons: 1) lectures on preserving the magic of Christmas for all boys and girls begins early next year - like right after Halloween, and 2) do what’s right for your family at Christmas and always - even if it seems fairly odd.