I remember Christmas when I was a kid. In mid-November, when the Santa Ana winds had swept the air in the mountains east of San Diego clean, and the mornings broke clear and cold through the pines outside my window, my mom came home from the post office bearing the promise of Christmas. Under the pile of bills and holiday charity solicitations she’d set on the corner of the kitchen table, I glimpsed a thick, rectangular catalog with a shiny cover: the Montgomery Ward Christmas “wish book.”
My heart raced. I pulled the heavy volume into my arms and hugged it all the way to the couch. Leaning back into the worn upholstery, I gazed at the cover. A closeup of a gleaming red glass Christmas ornament reflected a family gathered around the fireplace opening gifts. The tree’s boughs made a fuzzy, green halo around the ornament.
I opened the cover and skipped past the pages of ladies’ holiday dresses and festive velour pant sets. When I turned a page and saw the dolls, I gasped. Every year Monkey Wards started the toy pages with dolls. Not dolls like I played with, hair ragged and uncombable from washing, eyes and mouths worn away from years of loving. These dolls wore black patent-leather shoes and white stockings. One doll I remember had fat blond curls that stuck out from beneath her blue fur hat. Her face looked like a pouty angel, and her blue fur coat buttoned up with round pearl buttons.
Every year I asked my mom for one of those dolls. Every year my mom said, “They’re too expensive. And you can’t play with them anyway. They’re just to look at.”
After the fancy dolls, I pored over the regular ones: dolls who drank from bottles and sat in high chairs. Dolls with hair that grew. Dolls that came with tiny strollers so you could push them to the grocery store. After the dolls came the doll accessories. Doll clothes, doll beds, doll blankets. On almost every page, I found something I wanted. Turning page after page, a mantra began beating in my brain. “I want that. I want that. I want that.”
In the weeks leading up to Christmas, the mantra grew louder. After we decorated the tree a few weekends before Christmas, I looked through the wish book for the eight-hundredth time and wondered what I would get. By then the pages had grown dog-eared and wrinkled from four pairs of kids’ hands turning and turning and pointing.
“I want that,” my little brother Jason told me as his finger rested on the picture of a giant yellow Tonka truck. My older sister Anita wanted games and plastic horses. My older brother Mark wanted a chemistry set and a slot-car racing kit.
By Christmas Eve, the mantra reached a fever pitch. The presents piled under the tree seemed to vibrate with expectation. Christmas morning, we woke in the dark and tiptoed into our parents’ room. “Is it time?” I whispered to my mom.
She rolled over, opened her eyes, and looked at the clock. “Paul,” my mom touched my dad’s shoulder, “it’s 5:30. Let’s go see if Santa left anything.”
We had to wait in the hall until my Mom had plugged in the tree lights and started a pot of coffee. With the smell of freshly brewed coffee mixing with the tree’s evergreen scent, we descended on the gifts. For the next ten minutes, we tore open our gifts like sharks tearing into a floating carcass. No one watched anyone else. Everyone looked only at his own gifts. And after each gift had been opened, each one of us said, “Okay, what’s next?”
By six o’clock, the frenzy had spent itself. We sat amid a sea of shredded wrapping paper and toted up our booty. The comparisons began around 6:05. “Mark got two presents from Grandma. How come I only got one?”
The letdown the day after Christmas was palpable. The tree seemed naked with no presents underneath it. For the first time, we noticed how dry the needles looked. By New Year’s, the tree came down, and January’s great gloom loomed ahead. After all the hype and all the anticipation, nothing could ever live up to the wish book’s promise.
When I had kids of my own, I wanted something different for them.
My husband had an answer. “Why don’t we celebrate Christmas liturgically?” Tim asked me. “That’s what we always did in my family.”
When Tim was growing up, his family observed Advent. Each night before dinner in the four weeks preceding Christmas, they lit the Advent wreath candles and prayed. As the time for Christ’s coming grew closer, the wreath blazed more brightly, one candle at a time. Each day they opened one more door of the Advent calendar. They saved all their Christmas decorating for Christmas Eve. “I can’t tell you how exciting it was,” Tim said, “to wake up Christmas morning and see the tree fully decorated for the first time.”
Not that celebrating the season liturgically didn’t have its own pitfalls. Doing everything Christmas Eve placed a lot pressure on Tim’s parents. “I remember a few tense times between my mom and dad,” Tim told me, “when they tried to do too much in too short a time. And sometimes it was hard being different when everyone else in the neighborhood decorated their houses right after Thanksgiving.”
Acknowledging the possible problems, we decided to try Tim’s way. Each year, our celebration has become richer and more meaningful. Our older two daughters, now almost five and two and a half, take turns blowing out the Advent candles as Christmas approaches. When our oldest, Rebecca, asked Tim last year why we hadn’t put up our tree or our lights during Advent, Tim told her, “Remember when we had your birthday party last month?”
“Yes,” Rebecca replied solemnly.
“When did we decorate the house and blow up the balloons and have the party? Before your birthday or on your birthday?”
“On my birthday.”
“That’s right. So that’s what we do for Christmas, too. We’re celebrating Jesus’ birthday. Why would we decorate two or three weeks before the party?”
Rebecca smiled.
Since we start celebrating on Christmas Day, we don’t seem to experience the letdown I felt as a child. The Christmas season extends right through Epiphany. Some families we know wait until Epiphany to exchange gifts, just as the Magi brought their gifts to the Christ child. Others give little gifts every day during the twelve days of Christmas.
Each year we try to focus more on Christ and less on the holiday hoopla. Christmas morning, we put Christ first by getting up and going to 8 o’clock Mass. When the girls are older, we hope to go to midnight Mass. The girls each get to open one present before we leave, a book or quiet toy that they can take to church. After Mass, we have family and friends over for gift opening and Christmas brunch. The Christmas carols we’ve been waiting for all Advent ring through the house.
We have experienced our share of holiday tension. Last Christmas, our baby Lucy was just two-and-a-half months old. With all the excitement, Lucy stayed up Christmas Eve until 11 o’clock. When I finally laid her in her crib, I still had to wrap my presents, prepare brunch for the next morning, and clean the kitchen. While standing at the stove frying sausage at 1:30 a.m., I thought of Mary giving birth in a stable. My dirty kitchen didn’t seem so bad.
As our girls get older, I want to give them more ways to celebrate Christmas and the rest of the year liturgically. I found two books that promise to help. As a gift, I received The Year and Our Children by Mary Reed Newland. Written in 1957, the book provides a year’s worth of ideas for planning family activities for Christian feasts and seasons. Some of the Advent and Christmas ideas include putting together a Jesse Tree with your children, making your own Advent wreath, and taking a field trip to an actual stable. The book also includes a lot of good information about how traditions arose and why we celebrate certain days. The book is tremendously educational even if you only follow a fraction of its suggestions.
I found Building Family Faith by Lisa M. Bellecci-St. Romain at our local Pauline Book and Media Center. Although not as rich in description and information as The Year and Our Children, Building Family Faith provides a structure for bringing the weekly lectionary to life for your children.
Either of these books will give you a better basis for Christmas than any wish book.