Sixteen years ago I was beginning the third trimester of my first pregnancy. I’d just quit working (Tony wanted me to enjoy the last few months on my own terms.) We’d just moved into a brand new house that we’d spent the winter having built and I was nesting fiercely. We were painting a nursery and devouring every book on babies and parenting that we could lay our hands on. I even went so far as to invite friends we admired much to dinner so that we could ask them how they made their family so perfect. With great kindness and much grace, Judy didn’t laugh me out of my own kitchen.

Last week when we piled out of the van at a rest stop somewhere in Ohio and I followed my herd as they chattered and jostled each other toward the building, laughing ahead of me I had the realization that my kids are bigger than the Staley kids were when I nervously prepared dinner for the “perfect family” and settled in to take notes from their “perfect Mama.”

The memory made me smile. Having dinner with their oldest son, Sean, who we crossed paths with in Germany a few years ago and who’s now back in the states, made me smile even more. He was Hannah’s first babysitter. Tony babysat for him. He’s an outstanding man, a definite tribute to his mother’s passion and dedication

I’m far from a perfect mother. I still think of Judy often and aspire to her example and that of a couple of other excellent moms that I’ve had the privilege of knowing over the years. We’ve been so blessed to find ourselves in communities of wonderful parents who strive together for the best of our children, collectively. I’m grateful for that.

I have been reflecting, of late, on what I’ve learned so far, 16 years into my motherhood, and what I wish I could go back and tell myself in the weeks before my first daughter was born. Perhaps some of it will resonate with you, or with a young mother you know: Click to read more…

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Our flight was direct and only 7 hours, which by the end of our three week journey, involving multiple airports and cross-country road trips, seemed incredibly simple.

After a two hour car ride from the airport, we were back to our home in Germany on a sunny Sunday morning. The youngest two children, having been refreshed by catnaps in the car, went outside to ride bikes, while the oldest two kids and I closed the rolladens and hit our comfy beds.

We had completely skipped nighttime.

I awoke a couple hours later to find the two youngest still playing outside in states of rapturous delirium. I thought the euphoria would carry them through dinnertime.

I was wrong.

By late afternoon, supper was on the table, and the two youngest had crashed hard in their beds.

To wake or not to wake? That became the question.

I roused the princess, ensconced in her fluffy purple comforter.

“I’m so confused,” she cried, tears dripping down her cheeks, “Did we have night?” My heart broke, as the ‘bad mom’ alarm rang through my soul. After assuring her that she could go to bed right after dinner, I cautiously went to my son’s room. I tested the waters by saying his name.

Nothing happened.

I spoke his name while patting his hand.

Not one muscle moved.

I checked his breathing.

Rhythmic.

When I pulled the blanket out from under him, rolling his limp body sideways, his eyelids didn’t even flutter.

What’s a parent to do?

While there is no ‘right’ way to weather jet-lag, there are certain strategies that may help, depending on your child’s age and temperament.

Watch it!

Unless the new time zone ridiculously out of sync with your home base, try setting an extra clock to the current local time in your destination. As you move through your day, note the times of overlap (when you would wake, sleep or eat in either location), and ease your children towards the new time zone by incrementally keeping them up longer or waking them earlier in the weeks prior to travel.

Playtime!

Feeling that the body is off-kilter can be confusing and stressful for children, therefore, it is extremely important you give your child healthy outlets for stress relief before, during (if possible) and after travel. Unlike adults, many children, especially small children, cannot yet verbalize their feelings, so they relieve stress in ways that are not so pleasant, such as crying, being short-tempered or having complete meltdowns while in line for passport control.

Walking, biking, skating, swimming, running—whatever your child loves to do, make sure there is time in the schedule for stress-relief. Exercise during the daylight hours may also help the child adjust more quickly to the new time zone.

Let the Sun Shine In!

With the appropriate amount of sun protection, getting doses of fresh air and sunshine can help boost a body’s immune system, which is important both before and after air travel. Being in the sunshine isn’t merely a mental boost: it affects the body on a molecular level. Not only does sunlight increase levels of serotonin and endorphins, but absorbing more sunshine during the day has been shown to boost levels of melatonin at night, which can aid in re-setting the jet-lagged body’s internal clock.

Eat Plants—Lots of them!

If you are fortunate enough to be traveling to a destination where fruit can be plucked directly from trees, then you’ve hit the nutritional jackpot. Fruits and veggies are liquid sunshine, and the vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals consumed in their natural states cannot be matched by anything in a plastic-coated capsule. Serve your child as much fresh fruit as his system can tolerate—and don’t forget the veggies and a few whole grains too.

The vitamins and nutrients contained in whole, plant-based foods will help your body’s 50 trillion cells rid themselves of waste more efficiently and more quickly repair damage that may have occurred during the stress of travel. A body fueled with nutrient-dense foods will be better equipped to handle the physical stresses involved when jumping time zones.

Wake Them or Let Them Sleep?

There are times when an exhausted child needs sleep more than anything else. But when a mid-day nap appears to be extending into late afternoon, waking the child may help prevent middle-of-the-night playtime. If your child is wide awake in the middle of the night and has no intention of going back to sleep, try having a snack, reading quietly, or taking a walk under the stars.

The key is to be flexible and try not to have too much scheduled for your first few days upon arrival.

As for my jet-lagged son, I tossed a blanket over him, realizing at that point he needed sleep more than he needed dinner.

Jet lag in children is difficult to deal with—especially when the parent is jet lagged too. But knowing your child’s temperament, recognizing her primary needs, and taking preventative measures can help you through it. Remember, even the tough times will eventually become funny anecdotes—fond memories of the trip of a lifetime.

For more detailed information on jet-lag in babies, toddlers and children, check out our book Bottles to Backpacks: The Gypsy Mama’s Guide to REAL Travel with Kids.

What has your family found helpful when combating jet lag? We would love to hear your tips!

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The idea of multigenerational homes may seem uncomfortable to some, and downright impossible for others. Adults moved away from their parents to have children and be free, so isn’t having the grandparents come stay with them going in the wrong direction? While there may be many bad things to say about a multigenerational house, the truth is that these homes are usually the best, especially for children. They gain a myriad of benefits, and both parents and grandparents gain some benefits as well.

Financial Help

There is a predominant thought that most grandparents do not have much money, and that is their main reason for moving in with their own children. While this certainly can be a factor, the truth is that senior citizens control over three-quarters of the nation’s money, according to GrandParents.com.
Because of this, grandparents can often help with the financial burdens of running a house and raising a family. While they should not be depended on entirely, they can still help with the bills every now and then.

Busy or Single Parents

Sometimes getting all the money needed to run a household leaves both parents very busy, and they are unable to give proper time and affection to their children. The same goes for single parents, who have to work but also need to care for their children.

In this case, grandparents benefit both the parents and the children. They allow the parents to go to work or do whatever they need to, without leaving the children alone. Grandparents can also cook and do other household chores, so the children are well fed. Children are given the affection they need, and would normally get, from parents.

Love and Affection

Even if the parents are not busy, grandparents are able to give another source of love to children that they would not have otherwise. When a child grows up just with his or her parents, some children find it hard to believe that other adults can give them love. With grandparents around, this broadens that horizon. It also gives them more love than a singular mother and father could, because there are more people around.

Life Lessons

One of the most important functions of grandparents is to give their grandchildren certain life lessons. This can be from stories of the past, or just general experience and knowledge that grandparents have accumulated in their long life. Since grandparents are in the same house, the children have easy access to this connection with their grandparents.

Chain of Love

Children don’t think about it too often, and no one really wants to admit it is a possibility, but there is always a chance that something can happen to the parents that will dramatically affect the children. They can get a divorce, they can die in an accident or they can contract a fatal and terminal disease.

When this happens, children often go live with their grandparents. If children don’t know their grandparents, or rarely see them, it can be a very stressful time for children. They do not know what to expect, and there may be negative consequences for the child and the family.

If children are currently living with their grandparents, then they already know what to expect. After understanding that something is preventing their parents from attending to them and loving them, they can easily depend on grandparents for the same love and affection.

Energy and Happiness

Until now, all of the benefits have been about the parents and children, but they aren’t the only ones benefitting from this move. Grandparents often benefit as well from moving in with the rest of the family, because they have a sense of purpose again. Not only that, but keeping up with the children gives them a new sense of energy, and it gives them exercise as well. They also get more mental stimulation because they have to be imaginative around the children, or they have to help with homework.

Conclusion

Most people fear having a multigenerational household, but the truth is that everyone benefits from it. Even if there are disputes between the parents and grandparents, they can often be dropped to care for the children and to maintain a healthy household. Don’t fear having the grandparents move in; it should be embraced, because it helps everyone.

Author Bio:

Tom writes for Assisted Living Today, a leading source of information on a range of topics related to elderly care and connecticut assisted living .

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I have odd parents, and that is what I love about them.

My father was a Texan geologist turned yacht salesman, and also a professional classical musician. He was the type of man who told the same jokes over and over again, and no one seemed to get them. My mother I’ve given the nickname ‘posh Brit’ because that is exactly what she is: an English woman with a love of the designer clothing and jewelry, as well as great food. However eccentric they were when I was growing up, they still had facets of being very conservative. They were Catholic and my mom has a thing with being super, super clean. She can cook almost anything, and all of us delight in the feasts she spends hours preparing.

I, on the other hand, have never been conservative. I sleep in late, can’t clean to save my life, and never pictured myself being a parent. I had taken on my father’s love of the arts but didn’t want to have the rigidity that the school system pushed. I wanted freedom and choice. And for some reason, I believed that family was a ‘cop out’ and not something that interested me. Indeed, boarding school had made me believe that an academic career was the most important thing I could achieve.

Now that I am a mother, I look back on that image I had and feel saddened. I went off to school in the 8^th grade and basically grew up 24/7 with other kids, in a very strict academic world. We all felt suffocated and on top of each other, with no privacy. Kids were scared to emote for fear of being ridiculed. It had its perks, but the downside was very apparent.

I loved reading, and still do, but eventually that environment lead me to where I am today: an unschooling mother and family activist.

When I was just twenty and had moved to the States, I met my husband and was engaged by twenty one. This was something I had never envisioned, that I could have such intimacy and trust with someone so soon. I pictured myself as a rogue archaeologist, living in a tent somewhere. Instead, I had moved to LA and gotten married soon afterwards. It was the best surprise I could have asked for! We’re inspired by travel and living outside the box and yet we value the traditional family model, in the sense that family is first.

We don’t schedule it in, we schedule everything else around it.

Nowadays, to have such a view is indeed rogue. To not send one’s kids off to day care and then school and pursue a career is almost frowned upon.  Kids have become used to spending little time with mom and dad, and as one homeschooling  mum put it ‘ home is like a hotel, where kids check in and out’.

But things are changing.

Old school family values are becoming trendier (really!!) with mom blogs popping up all over the place, sharing their day to day routine with the world. One blog in particular infuses the radical notion of actually enjoying motherhood above all other pleasures, and it attracts readers who are not only single, but also hard core feminists who for one reason or another find themselves attracted to the image of a happy, smiling, and religious family.

Because of the internet, blogging, and social media, people can connect with eachother like never before, and learn from one another’s preferences. Magazines like Bust interview women who ( gasp) love their arranged marriage, despite catering to a feminist, women’s lib loving crowd. We are hungry to learn about other lifestyles, in order to properly discern what is right for our own, instead of shutting the door on anything outside of our comfort zone.

Nie Nie Dialogues is an inspirational read to check out, showing how a maman of 5 balances her desires and her family’s needs, as well as being an airplane crash survivor and burn victim. Her book Heaven Is Here is out of April 4^th and shows her heroic journey of recovery to physical and mental wellbeing, after having been in a coma for 3 months. I feel uplifted reading about her daily life and how she views the role of motherhood, and it certainly drives me to complain less about my own life and responsibilities.

The Wiegands is another motivational blog about a young artistic family of 4 living in Texas. Casey Leigh chronicles her life and the losses and hardships she has encountered on her journey in parenthood. Readers comment on how she makes the ups (her new pregnancy) and downs ( her miscarriage, her son’s asthma) so touching and real. Her writing is accessible and her story shows how we all struggle, but how we deal with it is what matters.

Are you unconventional yet drawn to the traditional? Where do those two ideas collide in your family and how do you make it work? Where do you find your inspiration?

This article was written by Elizabeth Kelsey: Wife to William, Mama to Kaya, currently writing from Phuket, Thailand where her family is living and learning together.

It was a completely new thought for me. It presented itself in the form of a book in an out of the way bookstore in Vermont on a bright Sunday afternoon: Last Child In The Woods by Richard Louv.  I stood for quite a while reading excerpts and considering the premise: that the average child in today’s American society is nature deprived.

I must admit, being raised as I was, that it never occurred to me that some people suffered nature deprivation.

If anything, my parents could have been accused of being nature gluttons and of force feeding my brother and I on a steady diet of pine needles and buckets full of garter snakes caught in the gully behind our island home.

Of course if I had thought for just a minute I would have seen the plausibility of the thought, of course I knew people who’d lived out their whole lives in cities and couldn’t tell a maple tree from an elm, but until last week I hadn’t.

Nature deprivation as a societal condition had never crossed my mind.

The general premise of the book, and other articles I’ve read since then, is that children today are being raised without nature for a variety of reasons: the prevalence of television and video games, being two, but another significant reason the author cited is fear.

He postulates that parents fear what is outside their front doors, violence, kidnapping, accidents and so they don’t allow their children to freely explore as was common one or two generations ago.

Is this fear well founded?

According to the author and the studies he cites, no. The fear is propagated mainly by media. One or two tragic stories of a child coming to harm are played and replayed until every parent in the nation is terrified that this could happen in their neighborhood. One ten year old child wanders off from his family’s vacation rental in New Hampshire one summer and dies of exposure within two miles of his house and suddenly every parent is terrified that the same fate awaits their child if they are allowed out of sight of the house.

I have a whole soap box on America’s “culture of fear,” but I’ll save that for another article. This one is about nature deprivation.

Nature an antidote to ADHD?

Apparently, a regular exposure to nature has been shown to be calming to children, to diminish the symptoms of ADHD, and reduce stress levels in the subjects studied.

To this I add a hearty, “Duh?!”

Maybe one of the reasons that ADHD didn’t show up in record numbers when we were children, or when our parents were children was that our parents were in the habit of locking us out of the house for several hours a day to “go play,” whatever that meant. No kid who has played stick ball in the alley for three hours and been decked into the bricks fifteen times by well meaning friends can possibly have the energy to drive his Mom nuts when he comes in, and certainly he will sleep well that night.

Is your child nature deprived?

Of all of the things my children may well lack, exposure to the natural world is not one of them. This is not due to some great insight on my part or that stellar parenting class we are so grateful to have taken before our daughter was born. No, to me it was just natural to bundle them up and ship them out of doors, for their sanity and mine. It is gratifying to be reinforced in this accidental success of my parenting journey. However, I’m not sure I buy it entirely.

Supposedly nature deprived persons are more stressed, less attentive, and at some sort of emotional and spiritual disadvantage.

I am the first to tout the therapeutic benefit of nature in treating these symptoms within myself, however, does that mean that a person who has been raised, say, in lower Manhattan is a warped soul for not having kept snakes in a pail or fished tadpoles into a quart jar? That is painting a rather broad stroke, I think.

I know plenty of folks raised on television and subway stations that seems to be perfectly balanced persons and who are not medicated for stress or attention deficit related conditions. So what’s the point?

Evidently this idea of nature deprivation, although new to me, is not new to a whole lot of other people who are far more knowledgeable in this field than I am. The fact, alone, that a book of several hundred pages could be written on this topic and become a reasonably popular read among parents as diverse as tree huggers in California and the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention (who have endorsed the book) says that there is a need and that the book resonates with a wide variety of people across our culture. You can spend the twenty bucks or so and read the book if you like, or you can put the twenty bucks toward a season pass at your local state park.

One of the things that my parents, unquestionably, did well was to let us get dirty.

I remember playing out in a driving rain with rivulets pouring off the ends of my braids, and water filling my boots as we waded in the gully full of rushing water. Taking a page out of my mother’s book, I try not to get too bent out of shape when my own children come to the door carrying their boots (which they had to excavate from the mud) with black socks after losing to the sink holes in the “fire swamp” as they call the mucky region of our forest just below the driveway.

I repeat the mantra of this season of motherhood with almost religious diligence: “Mud is good. Dirt makes them happy. Pine needles pass through the digestive tract.”

Sure. It would be easier to put tidy children in front of a movie all afternoon four or so days a week. There would be a lot less laundry and I’ll bet I could even get away with bathing them only ONCE a day in the summer if I did that. But is there any substitute for a thoroughly filthy girl with bangs stuck straight up with mud instead of hair gel, mud smeared evenly across her cheeks instead of makeup and dress patched with sand stains pine tar, eyes shining telling the story of the fort she’s built under a fallen tree in the hollow? She’s even learned to tie together pine branches to make a sort of thatch.

I’m not going to read the book.

I already agree with him on all of the practical levels, I could tell that from reading the jacket. However, I’m grateful to the author for causing me to consider the “why” of what is already second nature. He has caused me to be a little more intentional and cognizant of my reasons for wrapping these kids up and pitching them out the back door for half of every day. Just think, they’ll be so well balanced when they grow up!

So what do you think? Are kids in general “Nature Deprived?” Are yours? What can we do about it?

If you’ve been dreaming of a big time adventure with your kids, perhaps spending a year or more in an RV exploring the USA, or Canada, or beyond then you’re going to find Kimberly Travaglino’s book a treasure trove of useful information.

She and her family have been living the dream, touring all across the United States for years and in the process they’ve learned a lot! In this book Kimberly shares her first hand knowledge of how to “Hit the Road” as a family, and this book really does cover it all.

What will you learn?

• How to prepare your family
• The importance of visualizing your journey
• How to get out of debt
• How to choose the right rig for your family
• Budgeting
• Working on the road
• The logistics and legal considerations of road schooling your kids
• How to downsize from your “real life” to your “RV life”
• Pulling together all of the details you haven’t thought of yet, like your mail, jury duty, and license renewals

On a personal note, our family has been traveling for almost four years across three continents and it took us two full years before that to “launch” and downsize from the static house-car-job American lifestyle. It was two years of solid work, weekly checklists and intense focus to transition to our dream lifestyle. I did it all the hard way (just like Kimberly!) If I’d had this book, it would have made the process SO much easier. So many of the issues I struggled with she walks her readers through, step by step. No matter where you’re at in your process, from beginning dream planting to weeks before launch, How To Hit The Road will help.

The Travaglinos are the founders of Full-Time Families, a community dedicated to providing support, resources and discounts for families who live, “full time,” on the road. If you’re considering launching for grand adventure with your kids, this is a great place to start!

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The arrival of a new sibling is a time of many mixed emotions. Parents are forced to spend most of their time and energy tending to the newborn’s basic needs. This can be difficult for older siblings to deal with. Many children experience a regression and begin acting like a baby again in order to receive more attention from their parents. Therefore, it is very important to prepare your older child to know what to expect and help them adjust to the idea.

There is no ‘right’ time to tell your child about your pregnancy and the impending arrival of their new sibling. But it is important for your child to hear the news from you, instead of from someone else. So whenever you decide to tell your friends and family, be sure to tell your child as well. When you tell your child, acknowledge and discuss any feelings he or she may have. And never deny or discount those feelings. Click to read more…

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The arrival of a new year is always a time of reflection and vision. Reflection on where we’ve been, what we’ve accomplished, personal growth and family development over the preceding year. A time to look forward, make plans and renew our dreams and vision for the twelve months stretching out before us like a clean blackboard on the first day of school.

I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions. They seem an exercise in futility to me, but I do make New Year Wishes and spend some time renewing the focus of our family, defining our dreams and laying out the path we hope to take in big, general, terms in the coming year.

Here are a few ideas that I’ve found helpful this year, and links to a few folks you might want to meet.

1. Choose a word to meditate on

I’ve often reduced a New Year’s Wish to a few words that I’ve repeated to myself throughout the year to keep my focus, remind me of my goals and to help me move forward in the direction I wish to go. Last year’s words were:  Live With Presence, Purpose & Joy. The year before that: Love, Peace, Renewal.

My friend Kiran Bradley posted something recently that challenged me to distill it further, to get it down to just one word for the year. I’m not sure I can do it, but I’m going to try. It needs to be a word that will affect all areas of life, or reflect desired growth, or otherwise move us forward. A word we can meditate on daily.

Her word for the year?

Altruism.

That’s a really good word. There are so many ways that could affect daily life, the lives of my family members, friends, strangers, the world, in a positive manner. So many ways it could change me, change us. I’m tempted to steal it, but I won’t. I’ll come up with my own word.

What’s your word?

2. A Theme For Your Year

 Maybe one word for the year is too narrow. Maybe you need something a little bigger. Maybe your year needs a theme. An over-arching subject to help you unlock your potential. Something bigger than yourself to work towards and work at each day. Or maybe something small, and personal, and completely internal that you keep chunking away at a little at a time.

In 2007 our theme was Launching The Edventure Project. We worked every day towards the goal of cutting loose the bowline on life and starting our open-ended world tour. It was a really fun theme for the year. This year my theme is much smaller, it’s centered on working on incorporating The Four Agreements into my mind on a daily basis. It matters to no one but me, but it still matters.

What could your theme be this year; personally, or for your family?

3. A Vision Chart

 I’ve seen lots of versions of this project, personally, for families, for corporations. The basic idea is the same: Create a chart that is full of your vision, or your dreams, for the year.

This is a really fun one to do as a family. Everyone chooses a few things that they’d really like to do, see, become, learn, or accomplish in the coming year and you create a poster out of it. Perhaps you cut pictures out of magazines or print them off of the internet. Perhaps you draw your pictures, or you write big, bold words. Perhaps you use art, or music, or poetry to represent your vision. The possibilities are endless!

When you’re done, you have a wonderful graphic interpretation of your vision, something to look at every day and keep you focused.

Encourage a combination of big, grandiose, “crazy” dreams as well as small, personal, intangible dreams and everything in between. Don’t allow anyone to belittle anyone else’s vision. Don’t ever say, “We can’t do that,” or, “That’s impossible!” The point is to dream big dreams together, imagine the possibilities, become energized by life and for life. The sky’s the limit!

What’s going on your dream chart?

4. Things You can do without

 I found this a fascinating thought.

My friend Melissa Banigan brought it to my attention through her New Year’s post on her blog. She didn’t make resolutions this year, instead, she and a few friends wrote down on slips of paper things they could do without this year, things they intended to do without, and then tossed them into a fire together.

How refreshing is that?

Instead of trying to change things, trying to recreate yourself, trying to cram more, better, faster, skinnier, more productive things into your already bursting at the seams life, why not let some things go?

Why not create some space in your life and mind?

Why not weed the garden and then see what lovely things plant themselves in the fertile ground of you?

Things I can do without this year:

• Guilt
• Drama
• Expectations

5. Create Your Own 12 Step

I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t have a big dream, or a big goal. Some people wear them on their sleeves. Other people hide them quietly in the back of their hearts, under a pile of old books. Everyone has one.

So why don’t more people achieve them? Why don’t more people live their dreams or reach their goals consistently?

Lots of reasons:

• Life overwhelms us
• The devil is in the details
• Time & Money concerns
• Lack of focus

What I love about Justin Mussler and his family is that they have a big dream, a huge, overwhelming goal, they wear it on their sleeves and their working it out in front of the whole world. That takes a lot of guts! What if they fail and everyone sees? They won’t. Justin has made this coming year in to a 12 step program for reaching their goal. Well, a 52 step program actually, one step per week.

Couldn’t you do the same thing? Take your big dream and break it down, month by month, week by week and cut that massive, hard to swallow elephant into bite sized pieces! It’s the way any overwhelming task gets accomplished.

Where would you be in 1 year with focus?

• Out of debt?
• Living in a foreign country?
• Traveling for a living?
• In a new career?
• Speaking a new language?
• Adopting kids?
• Changing the world through volunteer work?

Why can’t you be there? Why CAN’T 2012 be your year? Your kids’ year? Your family’s year?

The answer: It can be.

What will YOU do in 2012?

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I have known that Christmas was commercialized ever since Charlie Brown uttered, “Good grief!” upon sight of Snoopy’s award winning holiday doghouse.

Being a little kid, I didn’t know what the word “commercialized” actually meant; but I knew it had something to do with disco lights and tinsel.

The Spirit of Christmas Past

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that when you take a holiday largely centered around gifts and combine it with the American penchant for providing everything a consumer could possibly want, laugh at, or re-gift (remember the singing bass?), you are left with a perfect storm of materialism. No matter how often we try to remember “the reason for the season,” it still seems lackluster compared to the overwhelmingly glitzy pressure to buy more and pay less.

In our household, I can’t blame the bombardment of commercials via television, since ours isn’t hooked up to anything more powerful than a Blue-Ray player. And yet, the craving for a tidy pile of packages taints our holiday season.

As I was reading A Christmas Carol aloud to the kids (an annual tradition), I began to ponder why we feel the pressure to splurge during this time of year. Dickens describes in great detail the Christmas feasts of people of his day, and in many ways, the depiction resembles modern day celebrations, only with less plastic involved.

Bah-humbug!

I was moved with a sort of sadness and dissatisfaction with Christmas in general, because it causes people to over-extend themselves in ways which do not appear to be honoring to that Savior born in a manger.

Yes, there are feasts of celebration in the Bible; and yes, we should seek to give the very best of the fruits of our labor and to treat others as we would ourselves; but how do I align those ideals with my (fleeting) desire to purchase a Barbie Dream House for my little princess?

Before you begin to wish visitations from holiday phantoms upon me, let me make it clear that I am not quite ready to toss Tiny Tim out with the Plum Pudding.

The Spirit of Christmas Present

I enjoy the search for the largest tree that can possibly fit in my house without leaving green marks on the ceiling and winding said tree with tiny colored lights that blink like crazy when the kids push the right button.

The peculiar Christmassy scent of pine mingled with cinnamon and nutmeg makes me feel downright cozy. There is a joyful spring in my step, as I walk down the pine-laden lanes of the Christmas markets and a sense of happiness as I bundle up the kids for their yearly delivery of baked goods to our neighbors.

My heart overflows with this idea of goodwill towards man and peace on earth.

But what I don’t like is that no matter how hard I theorize, there lurks the misguided fear that I will let my kids down if they do not have a bunch of presents to unwrap on Christmas morning.

The Spirit of Christmas Future

I am often envious of my nomadic friends. They have made some tough, life-changing choices, which has freed them in many ways. Whether they are in a tent in the Sahara, or a cottage on Cape Cod, they have found that by having fewer distractions throughout the year, they can revel in the things that matter most during the holidays.

Though our family lives abroad, there is still plenty of space in our attic for the illuminated Polar Bear, and an entire storage closet in the basement to contain our holiday bric-a-brac and cast-off toys.

My gut instinct is to flee during this time: to stuff some things in a backpack, grab the kids, and go peel potatoes or boil rice in an orphanage somewhere, but that’s just not feasible this Christmas.

How does the average family implement changes without feeling Scrooge-ish?

Purge
A good start would be to clean the cobwebbed corners of the house: to literally get rid of the baggage (we have twelve over-sized suitcases collecting dust in the attic).

Minimize
Furthermore, instead of the usual potpourri of indulgence, as my husband likes to call Christmas, we have only purchased simple things for each other: some necessary, a few fun, and many hand-made.

Give
My husband and I have also donated money in each of our children’s names to provide farm animals for those in impoverished nations. It is incredulous that for the price of one set of doll clothes, we can buy real clothes for twenty-five children in Africa. For the price of a fancy doll, we can buy a goat (read: livelihood) for someone who can’t even afford cooking lard.

Practice Restraint
The last thing we have decided to do, is that not counting birthdays or Christmas, we are not going to purchase (or allow any purchases) of toys in the coming year. We hope that this will help our children learn to be happy with what they have and to use their ingenuity, rather than squelch it in molded plastic.

Hope
While I still feel these things aren’t quite enough, and that an object lesson (such as a field trip to Ethiopia) would have more impact, this is a good stepping-stone for helping my children realize the great need in this world, and what they can do to help—even if we’re not quite nomads.

“But, they were happy, grateful, pleased with one another, and contented with the time; and when they faded, and looked happier yet in the bright sprinklings of the Spirit’s torch at parting, Scrooge had his eye upon them, and especially on Tiny Tim, until the last.”

May joy, peace and contentment find each of us during this holiday season!

Opportunities for giving:

www.worldvision.ca

www.compassion.com

Image credit

I am immensely grateful to the family and friends who have taught me generosity. Thanks to them I am aware of at least some of the opportunities to practice it and it is so much fun when I do!

I didn’t intend for this entry to be cliché in that it is being posted during the holiday season, but when the opportunity presents, you just have to go with it, and maybe the good community energy can ripple out a little further. With that spirit, here is a snapshot into this past week. Click to read more…