Like all parents, my husband and I have tried to give our
kids happier childhoods than our own. In many ways, I think we’ve gotten it
right. For example, we don’t make our kids meditate, filling the air with what
we tell them is “sandalwood incense,” or serve them bricks of first-wave
Moosewood soybean-and-cheese casseroles for dinner.
But we just can’t seem to get holidays right. The winter
family outing of my childhood, for example, often included a wondrous,
snow-dappled lesson on the evils of greed. One time, at a festival in Vermont when I was 7, my
little brother and I wheedled and whined for a horse-drawn sleigh ride.
Miraculously, my parents gave in. We boarded the sleigh and entered the snowy
woods. I watched as the horse’s hooves made indents in the deep stuff. Even the
big droplets of blood looked so pretty, like bittersweet berries marking our
path.
Wait, big droplets of blood? The horse was bleeding. His
blood spread into the snow behind us. Why was this poor horse bleeding?
Suddenly, it struck me: it was my fault. I had begged. I’d been greedy. And now
the horse was going to die.
We haven’t been able to create that kind of special learning
moment — a touchpoint, if you will — for our kids. Not that we haven’t
tried. Once, when they were preschoolers, we took them cross-country skiing. Of
course little kids can learn to ski, but that didn’t mean we’d spring for
equipment they would outgrow in one season.
“It’s fun to run along beside us,” we told them, sliding
along. “Pretend you’re horsies!” The children put on a big show of falling
down, as if wading through hip-deep snow is so hard. Then, instead of getting
credit for our thoughtful lesson about humility and gratitude, we got dirty
looks from people skiing by. We scraped the snow off the children’s faces,
coaxed the blood back into their extremities and left. Opportunity
lost.
Even personal holiday rituals today pale in comparison with those offered a generation ago. Whenever
I felt blue, like after the bleeding-horse incident for example, I would flop
under the Christmas tree. Too young for “sandalwood incense,” I discovered my
own special treat. I’d lift some strands of lead tinsel off the tree and coil
them onto my tongue. I’d suck them while they were still juicy and then, when
they started to break apart, crunch on the little minerally bits.
Our children find no such comfort in tinsel because the lead
kind, banned in the 1970s, was replaced with bland plastic tinsel. And our
Christmas tree’s only other meager offerings are the earthy handmade ornaments
that replace yesteryear’s glass ornaments. True, those glittery balls were made
by oppressed workers in unsafe conditions. But they were damn pretty.
I suppose the kids could chew on the organic flax star
ornament made in Sri Lanka,
or take a bite out of the angel ornament carved from oven-baked mud in Palau. It’d
probably even be good for you, but who’d want to? Neither offers the seductive
poisonous tang as a juicy-chewy mouthful of lead tinsel.
You’d think Christmas morning would be a homerun, but even
on the Big Day we manage to disappoint. Our childhood Christmas mornings
featured soundtracks of acres of wrapping paper being torn noisily torn off.
Today, when our children open gifts all you hear is the sad, silent sound of
reusable, homemade drawstring holiday bags being tugged open. True, these bags
are good for the planet, blah-blah. But, as with other aspects of today’s
silent, compassionate, bloodless holidays, they are a distant second to
yesteryear’s orgy of waste and guilt and questionable substances.
This article appears in Nov 15-21, 2006.
