Hi!
From the Pipkins
When they are not creating overly ambitious Christmas blogs, Chris and Glencora work at jobs they enjoy and spend their days foisting civilization and Christendom on three lovable and energetic children. They live in Georgia. If you want to share some of your Christmas traditions (or make some other suggestion), feel free to e-mail them at dozendaysofchristmas@gmail.com.
Our Focus
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.” John 1:1
Why We Do This
There are, of course, drawbacks to this more “traditional” approach to the holidays. For one thing, it is counter-cultural, and the effort to resist cosmetic Christmas culture may carry with it the dangers of pride and obnoxious self-righteousness. For another thing, we have found that it is more or less impossible to find twelve gifts for everyone in our immediate family without resorting to simply buying cheap junk (we’ll talk about some solutions to this, though, and the “Gift Ideas” suggestions for each page feature “alternative” gifts which can be made rather than bought). We lack the wealth of the giver in the (justly?) famous Christmas carol as surely as we lack his obsession with dispensing birds in a manic-yet-methodical manner.
But the benefits, at least for us, have outweighed the drawbacks. First, Christmas is now a season of reflection and giving rather than a single-morning binge during which we half-expect spiritual fulfillment from material gifts because of their sheer volume. At the same time, we (and certainly our kids) tend to appreciate presents more when we space them out over the course of twelve days. When multiple gifts are given in a single day, there are usually minor presents that are eclipsed by major presents, only to be ignored and forgotten. Using the twelve-day model, we give the major presents on the first and final days of Christmas, leaving our kids (and ourselves) plenty of space to appreciate the minor ones.
To be honest, this has been the primary reason we’ve started celebrating Christmas this way, but we’ve found that a lot of other benefits have followed. The last-minute stress of Christmas Eve (“Did we get ‘enough’ for each other? For our kids? Does everyone have an equal amount?”) is virtually gone, replaced with excitement and enjoyment of each other and the season. We no longer have to get all of the gifts for everyone before December 25th. We can purchase gifts after this date, often at lower cost. We don’t have to bite our nails over whether a gift we have ordered by mail will arrive by Christmas Eve.
Probably more importantly, as our kids have gotten older, we’ve wrapped the giving of each day’s gift in a kind of ceremony. We are Christian, and we use this season to mark the birth of God into the world as a human being. Doing this over the course of twelve days (usually at a set time each day) gives us more time to meditate together on the significance of Jesus’ Incarnation. We usually read Scripture together, say a prayer, and teach our kids a Christmas Carol, which becomes the “Carol of the Day.” It seems likely to us that this sort of model could be easily adapted by other families, couples, individuals, communities, or groups of friends, so we thought we’d share it in case it makes your Christmas a little more enjoyable and meaningful. Take what works for you and holds your interest, and discard the rest. This is meant to make Christmas better—a sort of neo-traditional release from consumerist legalism, rather than a new set of rules to follow perfectly.
The twelve-day model gives us a framework upon which we can improvise. The following posts (one per day, starting Christmas Eve) are ideas we’ve either come up with or inherited from older traditions.
beauty in the past/present/ now
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