My stomach was reeling from a mixture of too much Chardonnay and too much pumpkin pie, when I realized there’s no room in my living room for a Christmas tree.

I had to have a tree, my mother was coming for the holiday and she was bringing presents. A tree was the necessary showcase for her beautifully wrapped gifts. And what of my daughter? Miranda couldn’t be the only one in her public school with no tree.

I slowly spun around the room looking for what furniture we might tuck into the garage until the relatives leave. There’s a couch, a chair, a coffee table, a bookshelf, all necessary for social and familial functions.

Then my eyes landed on my daughter’s worktable. It had started innocently enough, with a plastic container full of paper and a bucket of Crayola crayons. Now the worktable has taken over about a third of the living room. Plain paper, stickers, beads, Pokemon cards, glue sticks, paint brushes, glitter pens, small and large markers have spilled off the table and made incursions under the table.

As I gazed at the mess in my living room, I pondered joining a religion that doesn’t celebrate Christmas. My first choice was Buddhism, but I’m lousy at meditation. My second was Hinduism, but it’s hard enough for me to remember my daughter’s and husband’s names much less a pantheon of Gods and Goddesses.

So I decided on buying the biggest storage bins I could find. I know I could just throw stuff out, but that would require negotiating with my daughter. I tried that once, asking if we could throw some stuff out. My daughter, who is 5, looked up at me with clear blue eyes, her hands on her hips, and said in an offended tone, “I love everything I make.”

That’s how I found myself in Target on the weekend after Thanksgiving looking at storage bins. I found three that stack and will fit in my garage. So, tonight, after my daughter has gone to bed, I will strategically cull the worktable leaving enough mess so she won’t notice what’s gone. I know someday I’ll have to toss stuff and risk her displeasure. But that’s not until I run out of room in the garage.

I hope she’s off to college by then.

By Georgie Craig

Labels: artistic daughter, birth mother, Buddhism, Chardonnay, Christmas trees, Crayola, Georgie Craig, Gifts, Hinduism, meditation, Pokemon, pumpkin pie, Target

Stumble This Post

I half expected that having kids would make me lose my mind from time to time, but I never dreamed that it would make me lose my faith. Well, not quite lose yet, but definitely shake it to its inner core.

It started when my oldest son was old enough to understand Christmas. When I began telling him the Nativity story, it felt strange. I found it uncomfortably similar to brain washing. Here was this trusting little mind, willing to believe everything I told him and there I was talking about angels speaking to shepherds.

A “cradle Catholic,” I had stopped going to church regularly in my twenties but always had a strong belief in God. I certainly didn’t hesitate to call on Him in tough circumstances. When my atheist husband and I got married, I absolutely wanted a Catholic ceremony. It was important to me to have God bless our relationship. Ditto with baptism for my two boys. I instituted a nightly prayer with my sons, giving thanks for the day and running through a litany of “God Bless Mommy, God Bless Daddy” and various family members.

It was when I needed to start passing on the teachings of my faith that things got tricky. Why did I believe that Jesus died and then rose again three days later? Did God really make everything? What happened to the gold that the three wise men gave to baby Jesus?

A great book, “Blessings of a Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Traditions To Raise Self-Reliant Children” by Wendy Mogel finally identified the problem. Mogel writes that if you only learned about religion and faith as a child and did not study it as an adult, then you only have a child’s understanding of your faith. It’s no wonder that you find yourself questioning things if you try to pass on the same child-like information as an adult to your own child. We are used to simplifying things for children in other areas of life (“Where do babies come from, Mommy?”) but in this case, I only had the simplified explanation without any of the adult depth.

And so my search began. I started reading religious books. I tried going to a different church. I’ve even accidentally started a faith-sharing group with Catholic mothers where we have frank, sometimes raw, discussions about our faith and motherhood.

But what scares me is that this quest seems to be weakening my faith, not strengthening it. The more I question, the fewer answers I have. My eldest son asked me the other day why some people don’t believe in God. I equivocated. “Well, I guess it’s because He’s invisible so some people think He doesn’t exist.”

“Cool, he must have an invisible machine,” my son said. “I wonder if He’ll let me use it.”

The rational, logical side of me – listening to people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens – says that I have essentially been brainwashed. There is even an evolutionary theory behind it. Children who believed their parents and did what they were told – don’t go running off into the jungle or you’ll get eaten by a tiger – were more likely to survive. Our brains are hardwired to believe what our parents tell us.

Yet, the convent-educated Catholic in me whispers that this is just Satan trying to trick me. I’m reminded that if I make the wrong choice, the consequences will be ever-lasting.

I’ve gradually peeled away the layers of my beliefs and am down to the most basic question. Is there a God? Asking that question seems to have knocked out my communications system with Him. When I used to pray, it was like centering myself around my inner core and reaching out. Now the core is hollow. I’ve even lost the power to pray.

I know what I want. I want certainty. I want to be completely convinced about my belief in God and choice of religion. Then I will know what is the right thing to teach my sons.

Until then, I’m in my own personal limbo, trying to take the leap of faith.

By Suzanne Skyvara

Labels: Christmas trees, holidays, religions, Suzanne Skyvara

Stumble This Post

When it comes to the holidays, I tend to suffer from a kind of temporary split personality disorder.

There is the rational, sane part of me that knows that holidays are really about enjoying time with family and who cares if your cards don’t get mailed ‘till after the New Year and if those pine tree and candy cane shaped cookie cutters you bought with the intention of baking only wind up in your daughter’s Play-Doh bucket.

Then there is the other side that goes a bit mental even though she should know better -- the side that gets brainwashed by all the perfect holiday tableaux in the Pottery Barn Kids catalogs, and who secretly sneaks a peek inside Martha Stewart Living in the grocery line and comes away convinced that she should be carving out some time to make heartfelt homemade presents like mason jar snow globes or tea cup votive candles. . .

I had designated Saturday as our “find a tree” day and was kind of bummed out when my husband suggested that we go to Home Depot.

“Home Depot??”

I’d had visions of a cute photo of our little one cavorting in a twinkling Christmas tree lot that we could use for our holiday card this year and somehow the big box hardware store didn’t strike me as the kind of place that would have the right ambiance.

“Shan, those other places are such a rip-off,” my husband insisted. He’d had his heart set on Home Depot ever since our next-door neighbor told him that you could get a tree for $30 bucks. I reluctantly acquiesced, and as we pulled into the parking lot it began to rain. The ambiance was as I expected -- a bunch of tied up trees were piled on top of each other in a fenced in area of the parking lot, lying on their sides on the wet asphalt.

So much for getting that holiday photo, I thought. My daughter, Emi, on the other hand, seemed to have an entirely different opinion of the place. We’d just last week bought her a pair of rubber rain boots and this was her first foray into the wonderful world of puddles. Watching her jump and twirl and giggle, I pulled out the camera. As my husband waited in line with what turned out to be a near perfect seven-foot Noble Fir -- only thirty bucks! -- Emi and I ran around the adjacent plant nursery. I got a great shot of her leaping into a puddle in front a cascade of red and white flowers.

Next weekend, instead of baking cookies, maybe we will be making some cool Play-Doh candy canes and Christmas trees.

By Shannon Matus-Takaoka

Labels: Christmas trees, Shannon Matus-Takaoka

Stumble This Post