The House of Collins Christmas 2013
The year begins to collapse in on itself to the sounds of wrapping paper singing its swan song.
This Christmas was a year of firsts. It was our youngest's first Christmas. She is 10 months old, which is an awesome age for a first Christmas. She was old enough to participate in the unwrapping instead of just sitting in her mother's lap. Her reaction to her big gift, a minnie mouse riding airplane, was awesome. While she may not have understood that this thing was hers, she knew that the flashing lights on it were just for her.
Reactions to gifts were a funny thing this year, My oldest is at that age when getting gifts is becoming specific. When he was younger, getting something wrapped that they would get to open and keep was pure magic. We are switching from anticipation of gifts to anticipation for that gift; the assurance that that gift will be under the tree for sure, that it must be the next one or for sure a hidden gift behind the couch with the compass in the stock. How that anticipation, that assurance, takes the glint, the glamor from those gifts you only just received with joy when you realize that's it. How part of your reaction to the gift was based on the assumption that this was just the lead up to that gift.
This then leads to another reaction, maybe the more important reaction, that of the parent watching this happen in the eyes of your child. This reaction is a recipe of so many ingredients. My desire for my children to understand why gifts are given on Christmas, to honor the gift of the son by the father for the sinner. My selfish desire to want the kids to like the gifts because I gave it to them, even though, truth be told, my wife had all the great ideas this year. My desire not to have my kids become one of those kids, the unappreciative, the entitled, the spoiled. The affront to my ego that my gifts aren't enough which can so easily lead to me assuming this has something to do with me, that I am failing as a father because I could not give them that gift.
All this silliness is then tempered by memories of times that I did not get that gift when I was that age. The disappointment and devastation that was temporary and immature and natural in the process of learning the difference between want and need, the process of learning how understand, how to appreciate, giving and receiving. Learning to understand that in many ways things that are given to you are also for the person giving it. I don't want my ego to rob my son of learning these things, knowing that we learn more when we get it wrong than when we get it right.
Merry Christmas.
[djc]
