Santa dances with Mohammed
Well I think I’ve clarified my own religious beliefs some lately.
I got into an argument about Santa with a parent who insists that Santa is “not Montessori” because telling kids Santa is real is a lie, and Montessori focuses entirely on physical reality. I think I would have backed away and shrugged had she not felt compelled to follow up with that as Christians, her family felt the story of Jesus was much more important anyway!
Okay so given these two things:
1. Gabriel appearing to a virgin teenage girl to announce that surprise, she is pregnant without sex and the father is God, and her son will be born under a star and be the light of the world
2. An old man who likes reindeers breaks into my house to leave chocolate
Which do you think is more likely? Hmm?
The discussion has just gotten progressively more surreal. Says she “well Santa does not come down the chimney!” Says I: “I haven’t noticed Jesus on my front doorstep lately either!” “Well Jesus was a real person!” “Well so was St. Nicholas!” Etc. I think Adam Sandler could make a great little song out of this one.
I actually think the message of both is about a gift to the world/kids, I mean, God loves you. I am dead serious about this: I think there is a tradition of presenting gifts to small children and sharing food midwinter as an expression of unconditional love. So yes I think Santa is, despite his appearances in ads and change to red and white and all that, really just as legitimate a story as the three wise men. I was also listening on the radio about Eid and how the animals that are sacrified for Eid are required to be shared with the less fortunate. Sounds kind of Santa like to me too. Or Jesus like. Or God like.
What also hit home for me is just how non-Christian I am in some ways. I honestly do kind of believe as much in fairies and elves as I do in Judas and Jesus and Hera and Zeus. I believe they are all ways to frame something that human beings perceive that they can’t quite measure. I guess I do think there are good (feeding poor people) and bad (killing heretics) ways of treating with this thing, but I am not all that hung up on whether He/She/It brings stockings or bread and fishes.
Man are we going to have a fun time trying to decide what to do about Noah’s upbringing.
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Hiya: I am currently up at 12:30 on new year’s day mourning my secondary infertility. I, too, have a little boy, you see, but mine is now 7. And I am now 46. And it’s too late for us to have more children. I figured that now people write blogs about this, so was looking to them for solace, and thinking that I should just get over it, dammit, when I saw your comment posts about your stillborn daughter in another blog and followed you over here.
Um, I think we’re twins! Check out my website, which I entered above. Not only do I 100% agree with you on the Disney is evil thing, but I married a Jewish man whose parents would never let him have anything to do with Disney because he was a Nazi! (And who ARE those Montessori moms? Jeez.
I am kind of agnostic-y, but with twin twinges of paganism and athiesm, and when my son was about your son’s age, I remember googling “secular humanism” to see what they teach children and finding nothing at all but a bunch of kvetching. Too bad that so many of us have to hammer this stuff out from scratch! So we have raised my son to respect everything. This worked well until he was in preschool, and when the Christian homeschooled kid down the street began trying to convert him.
Oh. Also, I started off by teaching him Greek mythology. When he was 3 we used to play “feeseus and the minotaur” with a ball of yard in the kitchen! Fun stuff, if you can find stories without much gore. At any rate, teaching your kid mythology is highly subversive. It’s an entire different GROUP of Gods. (And golly. How can that be?) :-)
Eventually, we just taught him that all through time, people have made up stories to explain things. We thought that we were being as gentle as possible, but his preschool teacher told us that the kids had some real knockdown-dragouts at the preschool over religion. Heh.
I like your stuff. I’ll bet you can find a lot at my website, also.
One child is very special. We can travel anywhere and just kind of tuck him under our wing. However, we live in a neighborhood with no children, which sucks. Also, whenever we travel, we have to work extra hard to find children for him to play with, poor thing. But the big reason that I mourn is that I had this inner picture of parenthood and it involved more than one kid. It sounds stupid, but my picture is shattered and it makes my life seem “loser”.
We tried for 5 years to have this one. I did 3 transfers with a surrogate mom (one fetus died/one blighted ovum/one nothing), and then, right after the fetus died, I took some wierd chinese meds and got pregnant myself, the only time in my life. It was a miracle and part of me was waiting for it to happen again. When I was pg, we did one more transfer with the surrogate mom, but it didn’t work out. And I just … didn’t jump back on the ‘fertility train’ 100% after I had him.
I think, for me, it’s also surprising to be so old and “out of the running.”
cheers, from one boy-mom to another.
Kate
hi
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good luck