Thanksgiving dinner is still digesting but Black Friday deals wait for no man. Although, TBH, my inclination towards any Black Friday purchases is pretty low this year, partially because finances are tight and partially because living space is tight during some housing transitions we are working through. But gift giving is a part of our family culture (ie I really love giving Christmas presents) so the wife and I have been discussing what to get the kids, who are more difficult to buy for as they get older and whose interest entail a loftier financial investment than I want to make.
Every year we – well, my wife is the proactive one on this – have the kids make a list of Christmas presents that they want. We obviously will not purchase all of these as quantities range from 2 items on the list to about 20 items on the list. We veto some items because we don’t want the kids to have them.
Take the example of video games, which my son has been requesting. Rene Girard taught us about mimetic desires, and his desire for video games is certainly based on the value that his friends and schoolmates place on them. He hears about Playstations and X-boxes and has no practical experience with them, yet nevertheless desires them. As parents, we try to discourage screen times but we also want our son to be able to bond with his friends.
Issues like this are coming up more frequently as our kids get older and expand their horizons beyond their family. One thing culture does is to assign value to certain possessions, philosophies, activities, etc.. This makes those items more desirable (it’s all in Girard). So we could say that my son’s desire for video games exists primarily because of 8 year old boy culture. He wouldn’t know about them if they weren’t being discussed and extolled at the lunch-table.
This year, I’m trying to think about Christmas gift purchases in terms of “parenting my kids to be culture builders vs culture consumers”. As Christian parents, we want to make disciples of our own children. If we raise kids who are primarily culture consumers, then we have failed in this mission. The primarily place where this training happens is in the home, so our households have to be culture-building endeavors.
Culture, by definition, requires more than an individual. We could talk about “personal culture” but I just don’t think it is particularly helpful. Culture happens when a group of people share common habits, common language, common history, common desires, ambitions, goals and methods of achieving those things. These methods are communicated generationally while the ideals are captured in art. Anguish and conquest, angst and peace, run through the fabric of a culture’s music and holidays and celebratory commemorations, or in its stories or ancestral memories.
The household is the first place where a child learns culture, which is why I remember finding my friends’ houses so strange to visit when I was a kid. At least until I acclimatized to their family culture. To a limited extant, culture’s various idiosyncrasies can be experienced within the natural family. But for culture to become socially significant, it has to spill out of multiple households into larger communities, like churches. If a church is simply reflective of a worldly culture then it is not building the culture of Christ, it is consuming the culture of the world. A church that wants to build culture cannot be a consumer of culture.
Ok, so back to Christmas presents for the kids. What happens when you really build a family culture that is distinct? Your kids will sometimes act in ways that culture at large finds to be strange. For example, over the course of about a year I read my kids The Hobbit and then the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which they loved. Recently, a fight broke out amongst them and in her frustration, one child verbally assaulted her sibling with a word for word rendition of Bilbo Baggin’s ridiculous “Attercop” poem he sang while fighting the giant spiders of Mirkwood. After the episode was over and I had stifled my laughter, I told her, “Honey, I just want you to know that if you try that on anyone outside of our household, they are going to think you are crazy.”
I absolutely delighted in that whole episode and the family culture that led up to, while at the same time knowing that I am setting my kids up to sometimes feel like outsiders as they don’t get the joke, or don’t know the show, or don’t have the toy, or don’t play the game that all the other kids are talking about.
As we evaluate what kinds of presents to get the kids, this cultural consumer vs culture builder dynamic is in my mind. They are still young, and there’s nothing wrong with stuffed animals and toys based on cartoons, but it is also an opportunity to gift them something that isn’t based on mimetic desires, but on an intentional, parental desire to see them grow, enjoy, or benefit from something that our family values. We don’t have to feel like bad parents if we don’t buy the idol of their elementary school’s zeitgeist. We want to see their faces light up with joy with that special toy (which might be broken in the coming week), but hopefully we want even more to see them enjoying the things that we value as a family for years to come. Christmas presents might be the time to start building the culture that you want for your kids.
Nathan Writes 