Scrooge prefers travel over Christmas

Scrooge I may be but I still want Christmas to be fun for my family

Scrooge.  Yes, that’s my nickname.  It was given to me by my wife because of my attitude during the holidays.  Honestly, I don’t hate the holidays and it’s not a nickname I was given out of disdain.  It’s more of a comical way of labeling my stubborn, and sometimes serious, views about the holidays.

I will defend myself as a dad and say that my boys have their share of gifts (sometimes too many) and a nice big Christmas tree.  However, before my kids were ever born, I made a list of things that I wanted to do as a dad that are a bit different from the norm.  The reason I do this because I want to raise my kids with the idea of who I want them to become, not what makes them happy.  Mr. Scrooge strikes again.

Before I share Mr Scrooge’s thoughts on Christmas, I want to preempt my holidays musings with a more positive thought.  There are a lot of great things that come from the holidays – time with family and loved ones, great memories that will live with us forever, and an opportunity to focus on giving and loving rather than receiving.  It’s with that kind of attitude that I wrote 5 ways travel teaches your kids about the true meaning of Christmas.

While my thoughts and feelings about Christmas go back many years, I owe the inspiration for this particular post to Caz Makepeace with her blog post My thoughts on Christmas.  Caz and I are a lot alike in this area (and many others as well).  There is one difference here – my reputation was so well-known and deserved regarding my attitude toward Christmas my wife gave me the name ‘Scrooge.’  Caz just gave herself the nickname ‘Grinch’! 

Travel and Christmas

Unless you spend every Christmas traveling to a different place, many people wouldn’t put this together except for how they have to travel in order to celebrate Christmas with others.  For me, I have spent a number of Christmas holidays actually flying on Christmas Day (it’s cheaper!) as seen from the photo of Salt Lake City on Christmas Day.

For a number of years, I didn’t even have a Christmas tree.  2009 was the first year there was a Christmas tree in my house since 2002.  Growing up in my family, Christmas was always about tradition and family and my brother and I received a lot of gifts.  I have a number of great Christmas memories from my childhood so it’s not that Christmas has ever been a bad thing for me.

However, Christmas has become too commercialized.  It’s too much about shopping malls and presents and enormous amounts of money being spent on kids, friends, and family who don’t really need stuff.  While Christmas for young kids is great, it doesn’t look too appealing when these little kids grow up to be self-centered and always focused on what they have or don’t have.  Now I know all kids aren’t like that but it is just that spirit and the culture Christmas can create that I don’t like.  It’s just my anti-materialistic nature and much of that has been shaped by my travels and how little we really need to be happy.

I might be in the minority here but Christmas is still about Jesus.  I know that religion is taboo for many people but it is about celebrating a birthday and the love and kindness of a man who changed the world (even if you don’t like religion or Christianity, you can’t dispute his impact).  From a spiritual and religious perspective, it saddens me that Christmas is so incredibly huge and Easter is downplayed in our culture.  I guess remembering death is not nearly as fun as remembering birthdays but it’s the culture of the Christmas holiday that makes so many of the important things – like love, family, giving, and humanity – forgotten.

I don’t claim to be some altruistic, moralistic do-gooder who wants to rain on everyone’s Christmas parade.  However, I do want to be different.  Very different.   I want the lives of my kids to be different.  Travel has taught me a lot of things.  It’s opened my eyes to the world around me.  Even for someone as self-centered as I am, I don’t want to be like so much of the world I see around me.  So here is a list of a few ideas I came up with for Christmas a few years ago:

• Have a birthday cake at Christmas to remember why we celebrate – it’s Jesus, not the gifts
• Adopt a project, child, or person at Christmas so my kids can spend time buying a gift for someone who really needs it
• Have my sons pick a member of the family for which they are responsible for the gift – without spending money
• Use the holidays to serve – whether it be a food bank, shelter, or community service project.  Show them that there are people in need and that we need to love and give back to others
• As parent, be an example to them by showing my kids what it means to love, sacrifice, and give to others at Christmas and all other times of the year

Behind Scrooge, there really are some decent motivations for why I feel the way I do.  Let me be honest here – I can be a bit self-centered and some of these ideas make me very uncomfortable.  However, I want to be challenged to do these things so I can be an example.  Ideally, I want this type of attitude to exist all year long and not just during the holidays.  Twenty years from now I want to be proud of what my sons have become.  And for this Scrooge, that starts with me and how I live.

It’s a very high standard that I have set for myself.  During the holidays, I slip into Scrooge mode because I want to look ahead to the bigger picture and not get caught up in the culture that teaches us we need to be happy and get everything we want right now.  I don’t want a Christmas that is all about ‘me.’  I fear this holiday culture may lead to every day becoming like Christmas – a search for fulfillment through our insatiable desire for things.

I’m really not a Scrooge.  I sometimes play one during Christmas to achieve a greater good.  I want to live my life by this motto – To live my life in such a way, that my kids become better human beings than me.  I want Christmas to be fun but I want it to be celebrated for the right reasons.