KEEPING IT REAL FOR THE HOLIDAYS
An alternative Advent calendar can shift your child’s focus away from consumerism
“You know other people just get chocolate, right?” said my sixyear-old son, as we drew a festive message in chalk on the pavement outside our house, with the lofty ambition of cheering up the commuters who trudged past in the drizzle.
The kids had opened a door on their Advent calendar to find, not something edible and sugary, but instructions for that day’s festive act of kindness.
Google “Christmas kindness calendars” and you will unearth a wealth of blog posts on positive/ do-gooding parenting websites, with instructions on how and why to make your own.
Since I’m neither a Scrooge nor a masochist, my two children each have a typical, trashy chocolatey Advent calendar, too. But for the past three years, sitting alongside them on a kitchen shelf is my own simple handmade one, in which each day in December is allotted a small act of selflessness for the children to accomplish.
This year, for example, behind the door of Dec. 1 there will be an instruction for Johnny and Frida to “make a Christmas card for Great Granny.”
Dec. 2 reads: “Take tins to the food bank with Mom.”
Dec. 3 will see us donating three toys each to a charity shop, while the following day we will feed the birds in the garden. And so on.
Lots of the people our calendar brings us into contact with are far outside the family circle. The kids will make a Christmas card for the men who collect our bins, and they’ll make mince pies for the staff at the local mini-market, as they did last year.
Some of the tasks I’ve set them are pragmatic: donating toys, books and clothes from their collections simply seems sensible, before the Christmas delivers additional truckloads.
The jobs I scribble down for weekdays are far smaller than those for weekends. I have learned from experience that it’s easier to squeeze “play with someone who’s lonely” or “hold the door open for someone” into the school run, and leave the laborious “take Christmas cards to the firefighters at the station” for the weekends.
None of the acts are going to change the world. In fact, they are largely symbolic — little prompts to encourage them to slow down and remember that the world does not revolve around our wish lists.
“Children need to learn that objects can never satisfy deep needs — the new toy’s pleasures wear off remarkably quickly,” says Oliver James, a child psychologist. “It encourages an unhealthy equation between love and money. Love should be just that, not based on bribery.”
Only experiences, usually shared with intimates, can really do that.
Can a kindness calendar help to counter that?
“It really helps children to appreciate receiving if they experience giving,” says James. “They learn that behaving charitably towards others isn’t only pleasing for the recipients, but can produce a warm and fulfilled sensation in themselves, as well as an awareness of how fortunate they are. It gives children a reason to be unselfish.”
This month, a survey of 5,000 parents commissioned by comparethemarket.com found that those with children aged nine to 13 face the priciest Christmases, spending an average of around $1,600 on presents, food, drink and outings. Those with offspring under four are the thriftiest, but still spend close to $1,300.
Mine will have an unconscionable number of items under the tree, too. The introduction of the kindness calendar to our house was born not out of a desire to topple this temple to consumerism, but to temper it slightly.
It came of a nagging sense that the Christmas spirit could be a little more ... spirited. The warm feeling could be a little less fleeting, the significance a little weightier, the giving a little more thoughtful. Neither am I alone. “We’re doing something called a reverse Advent calendar this year,” says Bianca Presto, whose daughter, Ren, is seven. “Every day you add an item to a hamper and then take it to a food bank shortly before Dec. 25. I heard about it on Twitter and it really resonated with me after I read that more than half a million people now rely on food banks in the U.K. I like to think that, as a family, we might be giving another family the opportunity to have a happier Christmas.”
Random acts of kindness have developed into something of a pop-philosophy in recent years. The Random Acts of Kindness Foundation (randomactsofkindness.org) lists 100 “random acts of kindness you can do today.”
The Daily Telegraph