I completely sympathize with their attempts to avoid: A) going overboard on gifts that you can't afford; B) buying shoddily made items because you can't afford the well-made ones, but still want to give something; and C) the irony of managing to focus on gift-giving so much, and becoming so overstressed in your search for the perfect gift, that you make life miserable for yourself and your family. Kennan DeGruccio's favorite response when encountering a garish Christmas practice is "Happy birthday, Baby Jesus!"
Last year we observed them in some of their attempts to make Christmas a meaningful experience - full of, as we like to toss the phrase about, the "true meaning of Christmas." One was a "Super Service Saturday": a whole day spent offering whatever service they could - raking leaves, washing dishes, cleaning bathrooms, etc. - to numerous families. Another was to give only gifts of service to each other for Christmas. Some of the services involved doing things that family members had requested but had fallen by the wayside due to lack of time: organizing a spouse's overflowing book collection; completing a collage of the youngest child's pictures to place next to collages that had been made for the older children during a less hectic era; arranging a celestial scene out of glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling of another child's room. The children's gifts of service were even simpler but perhaps more meaningful - probably along the lines of spending time with younger siblings playing what they wanted to play.
My attempts to avoid consumerism last year ended in me making practically every present I gave to others. It felt pretty good, but is something I think I can only manage every few years or so. Certainly not this year, as I spent 9 months pregnant (4 of those in a state of constant nausea). So I resorted to buying gifts. I tried to get well-made, thoughtful gifts that I could afford, but was only mildly successful in this department. Even worse, I was a dismal failure at avoiding scenario C as described above (one of Cody's Christmas gifts to me was a book entitled "Calming Your Anxious Mind"). It appears that even though I want to avoid making Christmas into a farce, I will almost certainly be unsuccessful unless I make a plan as to how to actively avoid this. This is my goal for next year. I should probably start planning now.
The one gift I managed to make this year was a Sock Monkey hat for Cody, which doubles as a ski mask when the brim is pulled down. This really was a labor of love as my dear husband has been braving the freezing weather so far this winter on his bike.
Despite my shortcomings this Christmas season, I did take pleasure in the lack of Santa Claus in Junie's vocabulary. On one shopping trip, a woman asked Junie if she was excited for Santa Claus. Junie's response was simply, "No." Surprised, the woman lamely said, "Oh, so you haven't been a good little boy, then?" A ridiculous response on two counts. After a moment's thought Junie followed up with, "Excited baby sisser." Translation: I'm excited I'm going to have a baby sister! Upon further reflection, some of her comments during this Christmas season indicate that she may have been expecting baby sister to be born on Christmas day. This could be due to a confusion between my pregnancy and the story of Jesus' birth. Or maybe that really was the best gift she could think of receiving on Christmas day.Unfortunately, her gifts ended up being much less meaningful than that, and too numerous for my taste. I felt somewhat sickened after we spent all morning opening gifts and she still had gifts under the tree the next day that she hadn't gotten to. Granted she is at the gratifying stage of actually playing with and exploring gifts as she opens them, as opposed to quickly opening gifts, tossing each aside, then asking "is that all?" But still, I think she would have been happy with one or two gifts. She seemed to enjoy most the small things she found in her stocking.
Some of my favorite gifts received this year include the fact that Cody loves his Sock Monkey hat (Cody claims this is ridiculous and is not a gift, but I beg to differ). Another was watching my daughter dance to her favorite song with her favorite blanket (the boy in the video is Travis, the child I take care of on a full time basis.)
This Christmas, Cody decided to call the DeGruccio's "no-gifts policy" bluff. Much to my dismay he went shopping at the dollar store - the only place that makes my stomach turn more than Walmart. It's hard to describe the suffocating feeling I experienced upon entering Walmart after spending 18 months in Chile serving a mission. While in Chile, I saw people living the simplest of lives. I realized how few things I needed in order to not only survive, but live quite a full life. When I see everything available to us, most of which is cleverly marketed as necessity, I want to flee as quickly as possible. I feel especially disturbed when contemplating the ramifications (of the environmental and human rights variety) of the shoddily made goods available at Walmart, all for rock bottom prices. But I digress. Cody returned with some random gifts for Junie: a hippo flashlight; a jiggly rubber bracelet; a package of little red plastic firefighters chock-full of BPAs or whatever the most recent plastics scare is; etc. For the DeGruccios he purchased 4 mugs and two really weird religious themed "cards", one with a milk chocolate cross, the other with double crisp "chocolate-flavored" hands clasped in prayer. The weirdest thing about these gifts? The DeGruccios loved them.
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