Families Sharing Holiday Duties
J Gardener
Each Christmas season seems to get busier than the last. With all the parties, the family gatherings, the all-important gift-shopping, and the other myriad activities, it's harder, each year to fit everything onto the holiday calendar.
As if that wasn't bad enough, in most families, today, both Mom and Dad have their own careers, and the forty-hour work week is a quaint memory of the past. So, finding the time to tackle all of the holiday obligations while maintaining a family life and enjoying Christmastime with the kids is nearly impossible.
This hectic modern life has meant the end of some of the most time-honored customs that families once observed during the holidays. Pulling out the old family recipe book, for instance, and spending days at the oven, doing all the Christmas baking, is something we only read about in history books or historical novels. Stringing popcorn, as hanging decorations, is an activity most kids today have never imagined.
It's a shame to let these customs vanish, simply because our time is so consumed with the business of fitting Christmas in between our career obligations. Parents who find themselves lamenting the fact that they don't have enough time should find ways to help each other, during this season.
Remember when you sat down, in early December, and wrote your annual letter to Santa Claus? Your mom or dad would always help you with spelling and syntax, and make sure that you didn't sound too greedy to St. Nick. It took time, something our parents always seemed to have more of, in those days, than we do, today.
Parents today can help each other by sharing in those kinds of duties. A Santa letter-writing party, at which several children gather for a Saturday afternoon, can solve the problem for many families at once. The host parents can act as the monitors, helping all of the kids create their letters to Kris Kringle.
The other parents can be responsible for refreshments and materials, but after they drop their kids off at the party, then they have time for those activities which are necessary, but which may be difficult to tackle while minding their own children.
Those great old Christmas customs we used to love can be preserved, this way, while allowing time for mom and dad to handle the other business of the season. And ultimately, sharing these duties with the other parents in their peer group will create more time for their own families, which is what Christmas is all about.
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