Once upon a time, I made super fancy Christmas Eve dinners. We celebrated Christmas Day with family, so Christmas Eve was my one holiday dinner extraordinare chance to slave over a stove all day long roasting, basting, mixing, simmering, sauteeing and garnishing, all to make my family happy and content, and make beautiful, cherished holiday memories together.
Only … it never happened that way. I worked my tail off, making a beautiful meal, and my husband was indifferent and my kids hated it. Verbally. Loudly. Sometimes violently. Nice memories, you say?
So a few years ago, we began a new traditional Christmas Eve meal. It looks a little like this: the best tablecloth, dishes, candlesticks and goblets …. serving up the fast food or convenience food that was, well, the fastest or most convenient to get on the table. One year it was Arbys (we took the sandwiches out of the wrappers before we put them on the china). Last year my husband, Rob, waited too long to go out to get dinner, so we ended up with frozen mac & cheese and pizza rolls from Walgreens. Other years it’s been Chinese takeout. This year was a little more labor intensive: frozen cheese ravioli, alfredo and marinara sauces from jars, salad from a bag, and a loaf of garlic bread. Throw some cheap wine on the table, and VIOLA! The stuff that holiday memories are made out of.
Seriously, while Rob and I, and a few of the kids, can be pretty big food snobs, we’re also pretty keen on not losing our marbles completely. A big part of our holiday tradition has become being mindful of what is “too much” and to not sweat the small stuff. Spending a day cooking a meal that no one appreciates, and then being resentful about it is NOT the kind of memory I want to create. Having a relaxing evening, laughing at our menu and having minimal cleanup to do, together, afterwards - now that’s MY kind of holiday.
I just finished wrapping a pile of gifts and sorting them into piles by child and giving them a good once-over…my regular right-before-the-night-before-Christmas ritual. Though I don’t subscribe to the “each child must have EXACTLY the same number of gifts” or “We must spend EXACTLY the same amount on each child” schools of thought, I do try to make sure each child’s pile is roughly similar.
But over the years, that’s gotten a lot harder.
Take my oldest, for example. He’s 11, and pretty firmly out of the “toy” phase, but not yet old enough to get excited about clothes or office supplies. My second-eldest is 9 and getting to the same point quickly. We’re already stocked up on winter activity gear, art supplies and the like; I’m not fond of the idea of buying young kids a lot of expensive electronics; and since we’ve just cut way back on the amount of video gaming that goes on around here (so we aren’t about to buy a new system or games), that eliminates many of the most obvious gift ideas.
Still, we usually manage to find that one special item that’ll make the older kids happy, and the younger two are easy. Three or four wrapped-up toys are the stuff their holiday wishes are made of, even if the combined value of those toys barely adds up to one of my older son’s gifts.
But it’s hard to know exactly how to make it “fair”. I’m not going to spend a bunch of extra money on the littles just to even out the combined value of their gifts; but I’m also not going to spend a lot extra on the olders to make sure they have an equal number of gifts. It doesn’t seem quite right for them to have far fewer gifts than their little siblings, but the fact is, they want less stuff…and the stuff they want just plain costs more.
Here are a few of the ways I’ve gotten around the whole “Is it fair?” question:
1. We cut down on the total number of gifts given…period. Generally we do one “from Santa” gift, three “from Mom and Dad” gifts and one “From a sibling” gift (they swap names). The “from Santa” gift is the one we figure will give the kids the most excitement and joy. For a three-year-old, that may very well be the least expensive one!
2. We don’t worry about making each gift a jaw-dropper. Again, the little kids are generally blown away by anything they open anyway, and when the “From Santa” gift really excites the bigger kids, they’re perfectly happy to receive books, card games, or similar smaller items as their “from everyone else” gifts.
3. We don’t buy the kids anything–and I mean anything–in the months leading up to Christmas (necessary items like socks, underwear and the like excluded!). The exception, of course, is that they ALL have their birthdays right before Christmas. But since we keep birthday gifts fairly low-key too, this gives the kids a perfect opportunity to move any items they may still covet to their Christmas list. I’m not generally the type to buy the kids stuff “just because” anyway, but after, say, August, I’m a real stickler. If they want so much as a sticker book from the school book fair, I tell them to “put it on the list”. At shopping time, this gives me a lot of items to choose from, in a variety of prices, so that I can make sure they’ve each got a few things to open without breaking the bank on any one kid.
4. I plan carefully. I make lists, and sublists, and cross-reference those lists. At some point I dump all the gifts on my bed and stack them up so I can see exactly what I’ve got. That way, when I look at “the list” I can tell exactly which little trinket–or more substantial item–would be the perfect way to fill in a hole. Occasionally, I decide something needs to go back to the store or get put away for the future.
Perhaps most important, I’ve tried to instill in my kids the understanding that nothing is ever fair and just having presents under the tree makes us fortunate. Sometimes your brother’s stack is going to be bigger, more exciting, or more expensive than your own, but most of the time, it’ll even out at some future date. And if it doesn’t? Well, that’s life. My sibs and I still laughingly begrudge my older brother the “$800 worth of hockey equipment” he got one year at the expense of the rest of our extracurriculars. No, we don’t hold it against him–and if we did back then, it was short-lived. That’s life in a family–sometimes, the individual takes a hit for the sake of the group; sometimes the group takes a hit for the sake of the individual. As long as it, more or less, evens out in the end, there’s a lesson in all of it.
I’d love to hear how you handle the “making it fair” issue in your home. Do you count number of gifts, try to spend the same amount per kid, or none of the above? Has this changed as your kids have gotten older (and then, as your littles have caught up?) What about those of you with adult children?