O-mama - Opinionated Moms

• By Kate DiCamillo • 10 Comments
• Tagged in: For Kids

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My younger daughter just had her 10^th birthday.  We had a party here and she basically got everything her little heart wished for and then some.  Her room is literally overflowing with stuff.  Then, less than a week later, I hosted 20 members of the constantly expanding extended family for Thanksgiving.  It all went fine—great food, good company, crazy kids.  And everyone brought me hostess gifts—very nice gesture and absolutely appreciated by me but again more stuff. 

This feeling of “too much stuff” is not a good feeling to have before December has even begun.  Every day I go out to get the mail and there are at least 20 catalogs mixed in with the bills and now holiday cards starting to trickle in.  The catalogs go directly into the recycling bin.  Do people really use catalogs anymore?  I mean, if you really wanted to order a gift from Hammecher Schlemmer, wouldn’t you just go to the website?  This is starting to sound like an Andy Rooney rant.  God rest his crazy-eyebrowed soul. 

But really, I certainly don’t need to order any more stuff, and I definitely don’t need hundreds of catalogs.  But the quandary is, when you have kids, you can’t really just skip the “stuff” part of Christmas.

One of my kids takes after my grandmother.  They both have the philosophy that actually no, you can’t ever have too much stuff.  They both have a very hard time going into any store and coming out empty handed—this includes drug stores, pet food stores, weird gift shops, um…golf stores? I’m trying to think of really lame stores—not that golf is lame, but the store would be if you don’t play.  There is a definite compulsive element to it.  Would she pepper spray someone over an x-box?  Probably not, but her acquisitive nature is not her best quality.

Maybe my daughter is a future hoarder?  A little hoarder in training?  I can’t even watch those reality shows.  SO MUCH STUFF!  I’m sort-of like Andie McDowell’s character in Sex, Lies, and Videotape.  She gets very hung up on all the trash—“there’s just so much trash…where’s it all gonna go?”  And obviously in the movie itself, the concept of trash is not just about stuff but about people too, but it’s a heavy idea.  One of the wealthiest kids I knew in school was the heir to a trash fortune.  That’s one business that will never go away.  There will always be so much trash and someone’s got to deal with it.  And now we head into the trashiest month of the year.  And I mean that quite literally.  We are going to buy a bunch of crap, buy a bunch of stuff to wrap it in, and then throw all that stuff out with all the brutal, mind numbing packaging that comes with all the stuff.  Ugh.

So my plan for this year, rather than try to steal Christmas like the Grinch and just make it not happen, is to maybe try to offset the materialistic, commercial, crass side of Christmas by doing something good and maybe even a little bit eye-opening for my bubble dwelling daughters.

Of course, their school has lots of community service at this time of year—canned food drives—adopt a family programs at middle school and lower school levels, and I try to really explain why we are doing this rather than just hand over some money or some cans from the pantry.  For my older daughter, they actually did the shopping as a class and she earned the money by doing chores at home.  But essentially, it was just a fun day at Target with her pals instead of at school.

So I have planned a day over the break to take the girls to a women’s shelter close by.  I want them to see that there are women with kids and little babies who not only don’t really have Christmas; they don’t have homes.  We are going to take gifts, food, diapers, and formula—whatever they need—and we are going to hang out for a bit so that hopefully something resembling gratitude will begin to at least germinate inside their young hearts. 

A lot of this is probably residual Catholic guilt.   But whatever.  It’s important for them to realize that for a lot of people, Christmas just doesn’t happen.  And obviously this is something that we should all think about all the time, not just during the holidays—give back, pay it forward, cliché, cliché; but important.

Kate DiCamillo’s book is about exactly this—about a little girl who realizes—amidst the hustle and bustle of Christmas pageants and shopping—that the organ grinder that plays music near her apartment building is there always—not just in the daytime, not just for her amusement with his funny monkey—but always—all night long and even when it snows.  She knows this is somehow wrong but doesn’t know why or whose fault it is or even whom to tell. 

DiCamillo is the master of understatement…and she certainly doesn’t try to solve any huge social problems in a Christmas picture book.  The illustrations are incredible—gorgeous and evocative of older times, city life, the holidays when they were simpler, maybe less electronic?  The purity of a child’s desire to end everything that is wrong with the world is what drives the story and yet we all know that we can’t solve world hunger with wishes and Christmas pageants, but we have to start somewhere, right?  The book is beautiful and simple and one to treasure—along with The Night Before Christmas—one of those perfect books to bring out every year.