Image - Dimitris Papazimouris
However, as I share with you about this season’s mission, I must report a failure.
Recently, my husband and I bundled our three little ones into the minivan for an evening of toy shopping. Each child was to choose a toy to offer for our town’s Christmas sharing program. Our goals were lofty. We were trying to help our children grow in love, to cultivate charitable hearts and empathetic spirits. “You’ll choose a gift for a little boy who doesn’t have any toys,” I told my preschooler.
The power of the toy store was just too much. The bright lights, the glitter, the specially packaged Christmas items—all of this naturally gripped my kids’ hearts more tightly than some imagined child who might receive their gifts. We did leave the store with three toys for giving, but our children scarcely noticed as we put them in the cart. Drunk on the stimulation of the toy store, their attention was ceded to the things they planned to put on their own Christmas lists.
Lesson learned. Undeveloped hearts require protection. The toy store was the wrong training ground for equipping them for this task. It is designed to work against that. I suspect my hopes would have been better served by my going alone to buy our toys for sharing and having my kids help wrap them. Rowan Williams is right when he suggests that part of the adult responsibility for childhood is in cultivating a space in which our kids can grow up free from endless consumer choices.
“Children need to be free,” Williams writes, “of the pressure to make adult choices if they are ever to learn how to make adult choices.”¹ The sheer number of possibilities, some of them really lovely and some more pernicious, is more than young children are ready to handle. They don’t even have the tools to choose something they will really enjoy instead of a junk toy that will be quickly abandoned. Thrown into a roiling sea of consumer goods, they drown.
I have strong memories of the little girl in kindergarten that had to leave school before the class Christmas party. I recall feeling outrage and pity at the idea that someone’s parents would connect loving Jesus with excluding their daughter from the gift exchange and candy canes. The separatist route is certainly one means of dealing with consumer capitalism’s hold on our kids’ Christmas wishes. Faced with an economy that measures the joy of Christmas in dollars spent, we could well pull our families out of the mess. Is there another way though? In light of the gospel, can Christian parents make sense of the luster of the toy store? Can we refuse a misplaced austerity that would refuse to see any good in the delights of the world while also offering a prophetic critique of unchecked materialism?
However imperfectly, I’ve tried to buy gifts for my kids that reflect my own status as an adult who, through the grace of Jesus Christ, knows a little about how to make good choices. I’m assuming here that Jesus defines what good choices look like. I’ll even hope that my choices might shape my kids’ choices. I got my older daughter a Life of Faith doll,² a kind of evangelical subculture version of the popular American Girl.³ This doll, however, comes with a miniature Bible and arms jointed for prayer. I have mixed feelings about “Christian” versions of “secular” products. These Christian dolls are at least as expensive as their counterparts, itself no small problem. The storybooks that are marketed with the dolls run toward sentimentality and, at their worst, a sort of graceless, desperately pious version of Christian living.
Still, having spent a few years putting gifts under the tree, I’ve learned a bit of flexibility. I once stalwartly declared that no Barbie toys would ever come into my home. I’ve since granted my declaration was misplaced. Watching a Barbie movie on the couch with my kids, I can laugh at my past self-righteous, anti-Barbie self. Pretty pink things aren’t bad in themselves, and Barbie has produced a series of movies that provide good narrations of virtue. One of the chief things God has taught me through my kids is that I have to be able to bend.
However, there are certain ways that I will not be flexible. For example, I did not buy my daughter anything from the very wide range of Disney Hannah Montana products that filled the shelves on our toy store visit.⁴ Disney has created an enormous market for pop star glitz and sexuality to be sold to kids as young as preschool. I could rant about the commodification of young female bodies, about the way girls are socialized into an economic system that feeds their dissatisfaction with their personalities and their bodies in order to create an endless hunger for products, but I won’t take the space to do that now.
However, I do want a real alternative to this, and I see how much my little one relates to stories about other girls. I hope the “Christian” doll and book I got her will at least help us have a conversation about what a “life of faith” might look like. What does it mean to rest in God’s love for us instead of believing that we always have to buy more things if we hope to be good enough? What does it mean to live in a family that God intends for generosity and hospitality to others? Also, the doll I bought was beautiful. There is much ugliness in the world. Toy stores are full of plastic objects that are antithetical to beauty. The shaping of aesthetic sensibilities is itself no small thing.
Our kids get three gifts each on Christmas morning, because that’s what baby Jesus got. The three gifts, representing the gifts given by the three Wise Men, are enough to make them feel lavished with good things. Yet it’s also a way to channel the rushing river of consumerism into a manageable stream. The current of gifts running under our tree is temperate enough to remind us that we can’t have everything and that resources need to be poured out on children who have much less than mine do. But that same current is also capable of producing a tremendous amount of joy.
The excitement gift giving generates for children is a right and good part of the celebration of Christmas. Rather than setting that excitement against the celebration of the incarnation, I hope it will be caught up into that celebration. When they’re older, I’ll share Martin Luther’s thoughts on the gifts of the Magi with my kids. “On the journey into Egypt,” Luther preached at Christmas,” “the presents of the Wise Men must have come in very handy.”⁵
In a much smaller way, I hope the presents my kids will unwrap this Christmas morning will come in handy on their own journey. I don’t know how they can learn to be generous without knowing the goodness of the things I want them to be generous with. The toys and books they will get are mostly simple, beautiful things. They are things that I know will encourage their imaginations. They will also offer opportunities for fun and facilitate the challenge of learning to play well with one another.
I hope the toys I give will help shape them into adults who have the equipment to make good, holy choices. I pray that the trembling excitement of Christmas Eve, the knowledge that there is fun and beauty and joy in the morning, might somehow be linked in my kids’ hearts to the miracle of what God has done for us in becoming flesh and dwelling among us.
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¹Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2000), 27.
²lifeoffaith.com, www.lifeoffaith.com/shop/catalog/index.html. <12.8.2008>
³americangirl.com. <12.8.2008>
⁴tvdisney.go.com, http://tv.disney.go.com/disneychannel/hannahmontana/. <12.8.2008>
⁵Martin Luther, The Martin Luther’s Christmas Book, trans. and arr. Roland H. Bainton (Philadelphia: Augsburg Fortress, 1948), 59—60.
