Looking for loopholes in the holiday season
Earlier this month, the boys refused a visit to Santa.
I felt a pang. Because the time had come, and my 8yearolds no longer believed?
No. We shouldn’t be getting ready for Christmas before Thanksgiving, Gege said. It upset their sense of order and propriety, only a few days after Halloween — with our jacko’lanterns still out by our doorway. But the local shop that sponsors free photos had scheduled its session the first weekend in November.
I’ve been probing, asking if their classmates in the third grade have been talking about Santa at school. They reiterated it was too early to talk about Christmas, but it hasn’t stopped them thinking about their wish lists.
“I think Santa uses cameras,” Gege announced in the car. “Because he can’t see everything otherwise.”
His thinking reflects how he and his brother are growing up in the age where security cameras are proliferating, where the surveillance is matched by almost as much selfsurveillance.
Later, I explained to Didi that Thanksgiving is the fourth Thursday of November, which means it can sometimes fall around the third week of the month and in other years, as in 2019, almost at the end of the month, when it falls on Nov. 28.
Didi mulled this over for a few minutes. “That means I don’t have to be as good for as long.”
He seems a future lawyer in the making, finding those loopholes. Or perhaps he’ll be an entrepreneur who finds openings for his inventions.
I leveled my gaze at him. “You still have to be good yearround.”
“Mostly in November and December, though,” Didi said, possibly thinking about some recent naughtiness that he hopes won’t count.
A part of me wonders if their beliefs might change in the next five weeks or so until Christmas, or even if they discover the truth, they might decide to stay mum on the subject, pretending in order to get more gifts. Or maybe they’re hoping for a miracle, for the gift that my husband and I have already declared they aren’t yet old enough to receive: a Nintendo Switch, a handheld gaming system.
According to Deloitte’s retail report, holiday shopping is expected to peak in early December, postThanksgiving. No matter where the date falls this year, I worry about the barrage of advertisements and catalogs turning the boys materialistic. In Australia, researchers analyzed a sample of letters from a national retailer that collects requests at its Christmas village and found that 70% of children asked for toys and gifts by brand name.
In addition to St. Nick, Gege is beseeching our smart speaker.
“Hey Google, what’s on your shopping list?” Gege asked the other day.
“I couldn’t verify your voice, so I can’t change any lists,” she intoned.
“Hey Google, can I get a Nintendo Switch?” he asked. He was aiming, perhaps, to add it to our list, as if we might toss in the gaming system along with the milk, eggs and cheese sticks. She continued to be noncommittal. To counteract the consumerism, I’ve tried to remind them about the spirit of the season.
“There’s been a coat drive and canned food drive at school, do you know why?” I asked them. I explained that some people go hungry and cold — yeararound, not just in these months — and the holidays remind us to give to those in need.
This past weekend, they had to hang door tags promoting the Boy Scout Scouting for Food drive. For the first set of door tags they dropped off in a different neighborhood, my husband walked alongside them.
Our street isn’t busy, though (perhaps one car per hour passes through, if that) and I asked my sons if they felt they could drop them off by themselves.
“I’ll do the houses on this side of the street,” Didi said. Gege would serve as his scout.
I thought they would tire of it after a few houses, but they covered the entire street, including the houses around the bend in the road. A few minutes later, when I surreptitiously checked on them, they’d completed their mission.
“You think that was OK?” I asked my husband, who’d left for a business trip by then. “Maybe?” he asked. When I was a Girl Scout taking cookie orders, I used to canvass all the surrounding streets after school and on weekends; I’ve probably been in the foyer of most homes in the area. Although I wouldn’t trust Didi and Gege with venturing that far — yet, and maybe not ever — it seems that their world is expanding just as Santa recedes in the rearview mirror.
They are growing up in the age where the surveillance is matched by almost as much selfsurveillance.