Christmas Wishes

With finals over, I am finally free to rev up for Christmas. We actually have most of the shopping done, but there is decorating and general festivity to be done. However, my biggest gift this holiday is a 'B' in physics.

To clarify, I am usually a solid A student, but this one subject has been kicking my backside. I already had a B in Physics, but the final was scary in a 30% of our final grade kind of way. So when I saw that it hadn't had a negative effect on my grade, joy is probably an understatement for the way I felt.

What does this have to do with the holidays? Delayed gratification. It's something that our Santa Claus culture celebrates in words and disdains in actions. Right now the message everywhere we go is "don't you want....?" The impression I get from most of my non-homeschooling friends is that they feel compelled to buy their children every item on a long wish list of toys. For the record, I think this will have a long term negative effect, especially on their physics grade.

Being a college student, especially a pre-med student, requires a grasp of delayed gratification. How frustrating is it to do the same problem over and over, ending up with the wrong answer every time, until at last you have worked through the bugs and get it right? We have about twenty problems like that for homework every single week. No wonder over half of my class was gone before finals week. Modern life is about getting what you want as easily as possible, right? And Christmas is a frenzy of this attitude.

What will my children do if they want to be a doctor or a dentist or a lawyer? Will they be able to put in hard work with the reward deferred for a decade or so? A lot of young adults now can't seem to put in the two years necessary to get basic training for a skilled labor job. They don't even want to start at the bottom at a normal, every day job. Remember how Jacob worked seven years to win the hand of Rachel, only to have his father-in-law switch out his daughters? Jacob worked another seven years to get the wife he really wanted. That's a little extreme, but it stands in sharp contrast to modern men who expect sex on the third date.

I don't want my children to end up unsuccessful because their desires aren't handed to them in a pretty wrapped box. I want for them to want, and work, and associate the hard work with the eventual success. I want them to know what intellectual hunger feels like. I want for them to decide what success means to them and then to pursue it wholeheartedly.

On the other hand, I think that never getting what you want is disheartening. Not to mention that our society preaches that only naughty children don't get showered with gifts on this one special morning. So here's how I have been handling it: one present from parents, one from Santa Claus, and a stocking of fun but useful things including a little candy. They get many gifts from aunts, uncles, and grandparents as well, so it's hardly an austere existence.

I try to make sure that at least one of those gifts is their heart's desire, whatever that happens to be. Because I'm not into buying toys outside of major holidays (it severely limits their ability to have fun making homemade musical instruments with cardboard), this hardly seems excessive. This year, wish lists in my home include blocks, erector sets, bicycles, and some new-fangled cupcake-only version of the Easy Bake Oven. These are things that Santa is happy to buy.

These are things that my children have wanted for months, so imagine their joy when their wish is at last gratified. The world waited thousands of years for Christ, so waiting a few months for a new bicycle doesn't seem unreasonable. This patient waiting will come in handy should any of them decide they want to be a doctor.

Green Easter Baskets

A green Easter basket? How can it be? Don't worry folks, my ideas are green, cheap, and easy.

1. Skip the chintzy plastic basket. Instead, buy sturdy ones that you can stash until next year and reuse. I haven't bought an Easter basket for the better part of a decade. Alternately, you can make or have your kids make woven construction paper ones and lay them in a special place the night before like Christmas stockings. Instructions for the ones below can be found at http://www.storknet.com/cubbies/kidscrafts/basket.htm

2. Skip the weird plastic grass. I've heard of people growing actual grass in their baskets, but that sounds both time consuming and messy, not to mention the relatively high failure rate of houseplants around here. I recommend shredding normal paper, which seems to be what they did in the picture at left as well. We have an endless supply of scratch paper from my husband's work, so we are going to color it with pastel markers and then shred. If you use recycled paper and then recycle or compost the paper grass when you are done, the environmental effect is negligible.

3. Fill with care. Most of us can't afford to fill several baskets with organic free trade candy, and that's okay. I've collected plastic eggs from a few garage sales and sterilized them in the dishwasher. I am going to fill these with jelly beans. We'll have a few pieces of candy, some homemade, iced sugar cookies, and homemade play dough (recipe below) in pretty Easter colors. I always give each kid a coloring book and crayons, and I'll throw in hair pretties and other stuff the kids need anyway.

4. If you already have the plastic stuff, keep it and reuse it. Throwing things away is never the right choice, even if the stuff is embarassingly un-green.



5. Skip the boxes of Easter egg dye. The packaging is crazy, and it's a lot of money for food coloring. You can make your own dye simply by dropping food coloring in vinegar and using it the same way you would boxed dyes. Or, you can go really traditional and use one of the organic dyes below.



Homemade Play Dough
4 cups flour
1 cup salt
4 cups water
4 tablespoons oil
1/2 cup cream of tartar
Mix all ingredients in a sauce pan. Cook and stir over low/medium heat until play dough is completely formed and no longer sticky. Allow to cool slightly before storing in an air tight container or zip lock bag.

Organic Easter Egg Dyes
Boil your eggs in water with a bit of vinegar and one of these ingredients below, then let simmer until color is right--this will take at least 15 minutes.
Purple grape juice (for lavender)
Red cabbage (for blue)
Spinach (for green)
Carrot tops, orange peels or lemon peels (for yellow)
Coffee or black walnut shells (for brown)
Yellow onion skins (for orange)
Beets or cranberries (for pink)
Red onion skins (for red)