1. When our oldest son was almost 3, he taught us something about Christmas gifts that we still appreciate. We gave him a set of Duplos that year, and when he opened them he wanted to play with them...and play, and play, and play. I tried to interest him in opening another box, but Elwood said, "There's no rush. Let's let him enjoy them." So we did. Forty-five minutes later, he opened another gift. He wanted to play with that one too.
Our unofficial Christmas motto is "slow and orderly." Sometimes we might go from oldest to youngest to open a round of gifts. Sometimes we might each open a gift in alphabetical order. No one is expected to play with a gift for 45 minutes before the next person opens something, but the cardinal rule is "There's no rush."
I thought we had taken this from Elwood's family, where I remember being surprised to see them take turns. (My family took the free-for-all approach.) But one of his sisters was here with us today and she got impatient with the whole slow and orderly thing. While I was assembling dessert she started directing traffic, having the kids open multiple gifts in a row. Pieces were getting lost; there were stamp pads in use on the upholstery; I couldn't see what the kids had been given because I was up to my elbows in whipped cream. It was the most stressful ten minutes of the day, until Elwood said, "This isn't the way we do things here."
2. I mentioned that Elwood does the shopping for the kids, but he does it in a way that's a little unusual, I think. The kids don't make wish lists unless the grandparents request one. They know that Elwood will find a number of small and interesting presents for them. They know the gifts are frequently quirky -- often things they've never heard of. And they've learned that a gift that looks a little weird at first may become a gift they come back to again and again.
I was getting a haircut early in December and the stylist asked me what my kids were hoping to get for Christmas. I felt a little weird saying I didn't really know, but that's the reality: I couldn't recite a list of hoped-for gifts. And you know, I don't mean this in a judgy way at all -- I'm more interested in affirming my husband here than in telling other families how they ought to do things -- but there's much to be said for fostering a kid's willingness to be open to surprises. A Christian who says to God, "Surprise me with your goodness today!" is likely to be a more contented Christian than one who says, "Give me X, Y, and Z today!"
3. Speaking of surprises from God: wow. If you have been reading this blog for years and years and years, you might remember a long-ago struggle with tithing when my husband was unemployed and its surprising aftermath. Last week I sat down to catch up on our giving. I'd let our non-parish gifts slide since JUNE, and so I was pretty behind. (Once my friend Anneleisa had such a great experience at confession that she wanted to tell everyone about it. She felt a little awkward saying "I just went to confession!" again and again, and finally she told me, "I feel like I should go pray in a closet!" I feel like I should go write checks in a closet now, instead of telling the internet that I wrote them.) I transferred money out of savings so I didn't have to worry about whether the checks would would clear, and I felt the happiness I've grown accustomed to feeling when I dropped them in the mailbox. I had no expectation -- I mean, truly, zero expectation -- that anything out of the ordinary would happen financially. I was just catching up, feeling a little embarrassed about getting behind.
This morning -- Christmas morning -- I got a notification from Mint that we'd received a sizable tax refund. This was so improbable that I assumed it was a phishing email. But no: our state revenue department deposited a big chunk of money in our checking account on Friday -- more than half of the amount I sent out to various charities last week. I have no idea why this happened (and it's possible that they made an error), but I suspect it's an expression of a lovely truth that I find too easy to forget: you can never out-give God. On this day, of all days, you'd think I could remember that. Merry Christmas, friends. :-)
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