Holiday Creep and How We Celebrate Bodhi Day.

 This post is approximately one month late. Better late than never? 

We've all heard and perhaps participated in the ongoing grumblings about the holiday creep over the last several years and I've been no different. A few years ago, my eye-rolling had more to do with the utter ridiculousness of advertising Christmas before Halloween as well as the jarringly consumerist/materialist focus of the holiday in general, particularly compared to what I remember from my own childhood. In the last few years, holiday creep has been bothering me for different reasons. In fact, I've been having a little bit of a crisis over the last few years in determining how best to honor the traditions of my ancestors and my childhood, while incorporating my values and spiritual beliefs and/or non-beliefs.

I've begun to wonder, how does one celebrate Christmas when one is not only not-Christian, but has now decided they are Something Else. Buddhist, in our case. How does one respect the beliefs and sanctity of the holiday for those who do believe, while allowing ourselves to participate in family traditions and the nostalgia of our youth? How does one participate without cheapening it? How the heck do I explain all of it to my kids? (Most importantly). 

I've polled like-minded friends, who celebrate out of tradition rather than religion, and heard a variety of answers most of which involved something like "well, we try to focus on the meaning of the season as being about family and togetherness".  I'm down with that.  I loved Christmas as a kid and I still love it. I have really fond memories of hanging out at my Omi's house on Christmas Eve, eating cabbage rolls and watching the adults twitch nervously hoping the lit candles on the real tree didn't result in a four alarm emergency. My family celebrated Christmas in a secular way. I want our family to be able to continue some of those traditions, develop new ones, and leave some behind. I want to be able to continue to celebrate the secular stuff that means something to me without being disrespectful of the fact that its not a secular holiday at all.

So this year we decided to emphasize a Buddhist holiday, Bodhi Day or Rohatsu, which falls on December 8th and condense our Christmas-ey stuff into a two week period after that. The intent behind this was to shift some of the focus away from Christmas and towards Bodhi Day in order to place emphasis on things we do believe in. I feel like we reached a good balance this year. We started our Christmas stuff later, made the holiday more simple, emphasized the things we wanted to emphasize and felt that we were being true to our own values. 

Here's how we celebrated in our house:

Advent Calendar - In previous years we've had a simple advent calendar consisting of ornaments in little numbered bags. Each morning, our older son would place an ornament on the tree. He loved it and it was simple, but our younger guy is old enough now to want to participate. After the Great Felt Calendar Fiasco of 2014, I ended up placing little cards with activities on them in numbered envelopes for the boys to open. And every few days, they'd get a chocolate covered pretzel with the envelope which thrilled them. 

From December 1-8th, the activities were related to Bodhi Day rather than Christmas. They included colouring mandalas, buying food for donations, making a Three Jewels craft, baking leaf-shaped Bodhi tree cookies, and lighting the Bodhi Tree. 

Bodhi Tree - On December 8th, we wrapped a little Ficus Benjamina with multicolored lights to represent the many different paths to enlightenment and placed our Buddha statue underneath.  The tree was lit every night for a month.

Rice Milk - This is a significant meal because it was the offering of rice milk to the Budhha by the young girl that brought him out of his ascetic quest and set him on the path of the Middle Way. I made a delicious rice pudding from this book which we enjoyed in new bowls for breakfast.

Small gift - the kids received a new book and their own chopsticks. 

Stories - We talked about the  story of the Buddha's Enlightenment and why we celebrate Bodhi Day. The kids have lights strung in their room which we lit each night for 30 days as well. We lit a candle and incense and three smaller candles representing the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. The kids were a bit young for all of this but I was happy to start a tradition that they will grow into.         

Overall, this holiday season felt more "us" than previous years and I think we struck a good balance between tradition and belief.

Simple is okay, too.

It goes without saying that this time of year can make it very challenging to stay mindful, to slow down and to simplify. There's just so much to do. Even working part-time and being very cognizant of my desire to maintain my priorities, I still feel stressed, rushed, and pressured around this time of year and every once in awhile, I fly totally off track.

Last weekend, I found myself awake at 11:30 pm, frantically cutting felt with a rotary cutter into (supposedly) 3 inch x 3 inch squares, to be sewn onto another large piece of felt and made into a beautiful handmade advent calendar. Did I mention I had already spent three weeks embroidering the numbers on those stupid felt squares already? Did I mention I haven't embroidered anything since I was eight?! The embroidery wasn't the issue, that part actually turned out ok. It was the 48 squares that I meticulously measured and cut out, only to find that they were somehow a multitude of different sizes.

At midnight, I said "screw it" and took out 24 kraft paper envelopes and drew numbers on them. I slipped in pieces of paper with activities like "drink hot chocolate" "buy a family a goat" and "drive around to look at neighborhood lights". The next day I bought a package of chocolate covered pretzels and decided to put 2 on each envelope every other day until the 24th.

My kids were thrilled.

 As my husband said as he shook his head at the rainbow-coloured felt carnage that surrounded me that night, kids don't give a shit about hand-embroidered advent calendars. Parents give a shit about hand-embroidered advent calendars. Now, don't get me wrong; I am all about handmade things. I strongly endorse making something yourself instead of buying it at the dollar store. I am very aware of the hidden costs involved in buying cheap things. And if cutting out felt with a rotary cutter at 11pm on November 30th brings you joy, you should absolutely do it.

But for those of us who would rather stick a hot poker in our eyeballs than ever touch a piece of felt again, its important to remember that simple is okay, too. Holidays have become very elaborate these days and for some crafty mamas, that brings them great joy. They genuinely love making professional-looking cakes, complicated themed decor, incredibly complex Halloween costumes and theatrical scenes for their Elf on a Shelf. Again, these parents should absolutely do this stuff if they want to. But lets acknowledge that its not a requirement for spreading holiday spirit and joy. Your child will not think you love them any less just because you chose to buy a cake this year instead of making it by hand, or if you give them an envelope each morning with an activity rather than an heirloom felt embroidered advent calendar. I think kids are really good at focusing on the spirit of the day rather than the "stuff" that comes along with it. I was thrilled as a child getting my grocery store advent calendar filled with crappy chocolate. Thrilled. Would I have been more thrilled with a calendar hand-woven with unicorn hair? Probably not.

While I don't agree with criticizing moms who do go to great lengths to create these things, I do think its important to think about what sort of message all the Pinterest-ey stuff is sending to us moms (and dads,too). I consider myself a fairly self-aware person who knows very well my strengths and weaknesses and yet I still attempted this hugely elaborate felt disaster, knowing deep down it was more for me than the kids. I'm still susceptible to the message that we as moms have to constantly do MORE.  Its out there. Its an insidious message and while nobody can make me feel inferior without my consent, it can be hard not to feel a little crappy when I'm surrounded with these images and claims that this is the stuff that makes the holidays magical for kids.

Another important point of consideration is that while I truly think we should each do what brings us happiness, anyone who suggests they create elaborate elf scenes and then posts pictures of it on social media is only doing it for their kids is perhaps not telling the whole story.

My point is simply that its ok to do things your own way, during the holidays and all year long. We all have our ways of sharing love with our families. I spend hours in the kitchen so as to not let a frozen pizza cross the threshold of this house. That's just one way that I give, because I love to cook and because healthy food is right at the top of my parenting priority list. That doesn't make me better than someone who eats food out of a box and it doesn't make me worse than someone who can create a magical forest scene out of a cake and some fondant. This season, try to guard yourself against the temptation to always do more. Instead, do what you love, with the people you love, and leave it at that.