The broader my circles get within Christianity, the more often I bump into people who don’t do gifts at Christmas. I’m not trying to suggest this is a wrong perspective or that others need to change their convictions, but I want to share our perspective — because we haven’t found the thing most of these families are concerned about to be a problem: namely, greed.
The most common reasoning I hear for avoiding gifts as a Christmas tradition is that people don’t want their kids to be focused on getting presents, and learn to be greedy. While I can’t say that none of my kids have ever, at any moment, been a little heavy on the “I want,” I can say that both in the long run, and overall in the short run, my kids are more focused on blessing their friends and family by giving.
This post is probably going to be a little “grab bag,” more than linear (no pun intended), but let’s talk about a few relevant ideas.
Giving Requires a Recipient
This is the most minor point, but it’s focused on the greatest concern, so let’s get it out of the way first. If Christmas involves gifts, then our kids will necessarily be receiving gifts, and it’s better to give than to receive.
Here’s the other side of that: in order for someone to give, someone else has to be willing to receive. If we reject gifts, we’re cheating others out of the blessing of giving. Being a gracious recipient is an important life skill (and, frankly, one few people have learned well). So the “receiving” aspect of things, while secondary, is also important and can be useful and edifying if we choose to make it so.
Focus on Giving
At our house, the primary focus of Christmas gift-giving is just that: gift-giving. There is receiving, of course (see the previous point), but the greatest emphasis is on giving. This is a hard thing to put into words because it’s largely a matter of household culture. We don’t really do anything “special” to make this the focus; it’s just the way we talk about it and what we model. Our kids think about Christmas as an opportunity to bless the people they love because we treat Christmas as an opportunity to bless the people we love.
I wish I had video of it (but my oldest kids are older than widespread smartphone usage) because my second daughter, in particular, was an excellent illustration of this. The Christmas she was three, she walked around to each person as they began to open their gifts from her, and jumped up and down in excitement, exclaiming, “I hope you like it!” She truly took as much delight — even as a preschooler — in bringing joy to each family member — as she did in opening any of her own gifts. Not all of my kids have done this to the same degree; their personalities and giftings play a part. But none of them are greedy.
There are a few things that I suspect help with this balance, so let’s talk about those.
Slow Down
This is a tradition passed down from my parents. What happens in a lot of homes is that Christmas morning comes, gifts are distributed, and everyone simultaneously — and rapidly — tears into everything. This creates a sudden, brief flurry, followed by an equally-sudden end to everything. It feels anticlimactic. And the sole focus is on “what’d I get?”
After we pass out the gifts, we instead take turns opening them, one at a time, all the way around the room. This not only allows us to savor the process; it enables us to enjoy watching what everyone else receives. And it naturally creates a higher ratio of focus on “what everyone else got” to “what I got.” The focus isn’t on “me”; it’s on “all of us.”
This is much more like sitting down and slowly enjoying a good dinner than wolfing down a burger on the run.
Avoid Commercialism
We do buy some gifts; don’t get me wrong. But our family culture is not one of “keeping up with the Joneses.” We’re not rushing out to buy the latest and greatest “in” thing. Many of our gifts are handmade or secondhand. The emphasis is on knowing our people and putting thought into finding or making gifts that they will really enjoy, not on who spent the most. We’ve been known to hear, “and it only cost 25 cents!” after someone opened their (much-appreciated) gift. Because that’s the kind of shared joy we’re after: “Look, I got a good deal. And I was able to give you something that blesses you.”
Keep it Relational
Although we do gifts at our house, we don’t do Santa. There are a lot of reasons for this, and gifts are among the least of them, but I do believe that plays a significant part in our kids’ attitude toward gifts. Within the Santa myth, the idea of gifts (or “prizes,’ as my daughter would say) is that they’re things one “deserves” for being “nice.” There’s an “I earned it; you owe me” skew to it.
When the focus is, instead, on the idea of gifts as something that real people in real relationship are giving to one another as an expression of love, they become what gifts should be — unmerited favor. Grace. This allows us to image the Gospel to one another in a tangible way.
Because that’s ultimately what it’s all about. The thing we’re celebrating is that God gave us a Gift we didn’t earn, just because He loved us and He wanted to. And He wants us to gratefully receive it.
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