Wreathed in holiday spirit

“I should at least have put a wreath on the door,” I thought with mild remorse as I drove home one day last week.

It was two hours until I was hosting our annual holiday cookie exchange, to which all the guests bring homemade holiday cookies and we each take a few of each other’s cookies until everyone has a variegated combination of treats. (The idea is to then have cookies at the ready to serve for any holiday gatherings that take place in the upcoming weeks, but most guests have confessed that their families eat the collected cookies within a day or two of the party.)

Still the first week of December, it seemed to me to be too early to decorate the house, and it didn’t bother me at all that we didn’t yet have a tree, because of all the watering and sweeping that putting up a Christmas tree requires. “But I should have at least picked up a wreath over the weekend,” I told myself.

But when I entered the house, I stumbled into a coincidence. “Look what Mary and Pat sent!” Tim said, pointing to the kitchen table. It was a Christmas wreath, lush and large and fragrant with pine needles, a red velvet bow encircling the dark green boughs.

Merely taking it out of the box to see what the mystery package concealed, as the kids had apparently done before I arrived home from work, had already caused a shower of needles to blanket the floor, but I didn’t mind sweeping them up. Once I’d done that, we all marched to the door and put the wreath on the hook that was still there from last year.

Hanging a wreath is a perhaps inordinately important gesture to me. Our house is not visible to passersby on the street, regardless of whether they are driving or walking, and in some ways that can be a cop-out when it comes to seasonal decorating. Why bother with jack-o-lanterns, Christmas lights or even spring flowers if no one but us will see them?, I reason when I don’t feel like going to the extra trouble and expense that any of these frills would require.

But at other times, I regret the fact that even when we make the effort, no one really gets the chance to appreciate it. We don’t even use the front door ourselves; we go in and out through the garage most of the time. Putting up a wreath is, in a way, the “If a tree falls in the forest” equivalent of home décor. Why do it if no one will see it?

This same question causes minor friction in our household when it comes to cleaning. My husband Rick believes in cleaning the house only if we’re expecting guests, whereas I believe in the value of cleaning just so that the four of us can enjoy a clean house. (His attitude does not extrapolate to eating well only when we have company, though. He’s happy for me to prepare good meals no matter how few of us are present to enjoy it.)

And really, the idea that no one will see our wreath brings up a larger issue for me: just how easy it is to insulate ourselves from society. I sometimes think I’d be happier with a regular stream of people walking, driving or biking past our front door. Living in the woods amidst the trees, deer and owls is picturesque, serene, and often blissful, but sometimes I regret not having more humanity around.

Nonetheless, this was the evening of the annual cookie exchange, and by coincidence, it was also the day that a gift mail-ordered by my aunts, who live two thousand miles away and didn’t even know about the party, had arrived. The wreath would be on the door just in time to greet our guests.

None of the guests even mentioned it. A wreath on a front door in December hardly bears comment, after all. But I knew it was there. And to me, just knowing that made the annual party perfect.

Peaceful and joyful

Not long after Halloween, a friend described her daughter practicing Christmas carols on the piano. "I know this is early, but it sounds so peaceful and joyful," she wrote.

Perhaps this is true of all writers, but certain words catch my ear in a particular way: a simple phrase that, when dissected, can't possibly be original or unique, but somehow hits me as if it is. "Peaceful and joyful" – it may not quite bear the resonance of t.s. eliot’s "When the evening is spread out against the sky, Like a patient etherized upon a table" or Robert Frost’s "The woods are lovely dark and deep, but I have promises to keep" and yet their pairing jingled in my mind as pleasingly as the Christmas carols must have sounded to my friend when she wrote that.

Peace and joy are words that are often twinned in the holiday season, of course. And surely those two abstract nouns are among the most noble goals to which we might strive. But “peaceful and joyful” are a more tempered version. Adjectives, not nouns, and somehow more modest and relative in nature. Even when the absolutes of peace and joy seem impossibly out of reach, the adjectival forms seem possible: even if we haven’t achieved peace and joy on either the universal or the domestic level, an 11-year-old playing Christmas carols can still be deemed peaceful and joyful.

I liked the phrase so much I decided to adopt it as a holiday season mantra and resolved that everything I choose to do under the umbrella of the holiday season had to fit into one category or the other, or better still into both.

This isn't to say I expect the entire month of December to be peaceful and joyful for me. There are other things I'll still need to do -- like buying groceries, and folding laundry, and commuting to work -- that may seem neither peaceful or joyful. But anything I opt to do in the name of the holiday season -- any party I attend, any gift-buying excursion I embark upon, any hours spent creating the perfect holiday newsletter -- are hereby required to fit into at least one of the two categories.

It’s a little simplistic as a benchmark, I realize. Peace and joy should be hallmarks of everyone’s holiday season, and for that matter, everyone’s non-holiday season as well. And I’m sure I’ll still find myself standing in a long checkout line or baking Christmas cookies at midnight at some point this month, feeling neither peaceful nor joyful. But I still like those guidelines. Peaceful. Or joyful. Maybe even both. As a way of approaching the holiday season, it just sounds right.

Christmas season under way

It goes without saying that really bad things can put the holiday stress into perspective. Find the perfect gift doesn’t seem all that important when you compare it to feeling assured that your kids will make it home from school at the end of the day.

But it’s perhaps less often observed that really good things can put the holiday stress into perspective too. Though I wouldn’t use the term “stress” to describe it, I was feeling a little overwhelmed with To Do items yesterday. I had two articles to file, three batches of candy to make, eight co-worker gifts and six teachers’ gifts (of the aforementioned homemade candy) to assemble, a Christmas Eve menu to plan, a few Christmas cards still to address and mail, and a handful of holiday-related errands left to complete.

And no matter how many times I told myself none of this really mattered, I wasn’t convinced. We wanted to give all those gifts of candy. We wanted to be sure the kids’ stockings were filled. We wanted to drop off the donation at the toy drive. And I didn’t think the oncoming holidays were any excuse for missing work deadlines, with their compelling incentive at this time of year of the paychecks that follow the deadlines.

Still, I was aware that I was starting to lose sight of the Christmas spirit. I wasn’t irritable, just frazzled. It was only two days ago that I mailed the last of the forty letters I was obliged to write on behalf of Carlisle Santa, and a bad cold earlier in the week set me back a little bit as well.

But late Wednesday night, my sister and her kids arrived at my parents’ house for a pre-Christmas visit. Holly and Tim played with their cousins all Thursday afternoon; after dinner we brought the cousins back here for still more fun.

I set to work packing candy gift boxes with the sounds of the four cousins laughing, singing, wrestling and dancing in the background, and that, more than anything else, reminded me of what the focus of Christmas should be: happy times together. Recipients always appreciate our homemade candy, but no one was actually going to notice or care whether there were four different kinds in their box or only three. Christmas Eve guests wouldn’t check under the dining room table to see how thoroughly I vacuumed. And my kids don’t even really keep track anymore to see if they have the same number of gifts in their stockings.

In short, none of the bustling around mattered all that much, but not until the house was filled with the sounds of kids playing together – long-distance cousins who don’t see enough of each other throughout the year but always fall immediately into the same joyous hilarity when they get together – was it absolutely clear to me what mattered. This: their silliness, their clamor. Never mind the housecleaning or the dessert-making or ensuring that every card is mailed in time to arrive by Christmas. The cousins were playing together and being loud and silly, and so at our house, Christmas had begun.

 

A weekend for gathering

Ironically, it turned out not to be such a bad weekend for holiday gatherings after all.

If the Saturday before Christmas is (despite Black Friday myths to the contrary) actually the busiest shopping day of the year, then the Saturday that falls mid-December, ten days or so before Christmas depending on the year, is surely the busiest party day of the year. And this year was no exception: we had four different invitations for the weekend just past.

But of course, like people all over the country, by Friday evening, we didn’t feel like going to a single event. With the worst possible kind of news coursing off the TV screen and through the radio wires and down the Internet transom, we didn’t want to go anywhere or see anyone.

But we went anyway, and in retrospect, I realize that it was better than not going anywhere. I was not in a mood to take solace from anyone else’s words. I did not want to join a prayer service or take part in a candlelight vigil. I didn’t want to read anyone’s reflections via Facebook post or even listen to the president’s address. I felt the same way I have after other tragedies on a national scale: there is not one thing that anyone can say that will make this one iota better, and I would rather be alone with my thoughts than submit to what will feel like empty noise.

In the end, though, it was surprisingly therapeutic to be with other people: first at a large gathering of acquaintances, then at a neighborhood party, and then at the home of a close friend with just a few other families present. All of these were holiday parties planned weeks ago, and only at one did we specifically discuss the events in Connecticut that had happened just a day or two before. No one tried to offer words of comfort or solace. We just….talked. And kept each other company. And made ourselves present with each other.

It was no more or less than that, really: just being in each other’s company rather than alone. I still can’t explain why it felt unexpectedly okay, but it did. Sometimes it’s all we have for comfort: the presence of other people. And sometimes, despite my inclinations to be alone during the worst times, huddling in a group is the best response we have.

Best seasonal job ever: Ghost-writer to Santa

Santa knows when you’ve been sleeping. He knows when you’re awake. He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.

He also knows what a good sport you were about early-morning soccer practices all fall and which pet you brought to the Old Home Day pet contest. If you happen to be in third grade this year, he even knows which tribe you covered for your Native American project.

I know this because within the 01741 zip code, I’m Santa’s letter-writing adviser. The other eleven months of the year, I write newspaper articles under my own name and also ghost-write for a variety of clients who have plenty to say but don’t enjoy putting pen to paper themselves. But when December comes, I get to work with my favorite “ghost-writing” client of all, St. Nicholas himself.

I hope no one will be shocked to hear that Santa utilizes a professional consultant. When he approached me for help, it didn’t seem any more unusual than any of my other clients asking for assistance with writing. If you are the CEO of a biosciences company, a former NFL quarterback who wants to reminisce about Super Bowls past, or a doctor who knows how to perform surgery but not necessarily how to explain it in terms that make people flock to your office door -- to use just a few examples from my current client list -- you hire a writer to help with your materials. And if your expertise lies in overseeing a toy-making operation and flying a sleigh, there’s nothing to be ashamed of in recruiting some professional help when it comes to writing letters.

The first time I worked for Santa, I thought it would be easy. Santa’s reason for hiring locally rather than outsourcing to far-off countries where editorial labor is far cheaper is that he values familiarity with the local demographic. And that I have. Sure, he knows everyone by name and general behavioral profile, but he doesn’t have those intricate connections that those of us within small towns enjoy. When we opened his mailbox last year and the letters flooded out, there was hardly a name I didn’t recognize. Kids all over Carlisle had written to Santa, and happily for Santa, I knew most of them even better than he did.

That turned out to be not quite the advantage I expected it to be. In fact, it nearly resulted in the premature demise of my career as Santa’s literary consultant. As Santa explained to me, some kids are already a little alarmed by the concept of his omniscience, and my suggested responses to their letters were compounding the creepiness factor exponentially. “Great job in last week’s school concert, second only to your performance in the Rainforest Play last May!” I wrote enthusiastically to one first grader who had included none of this information in her letter to Santa. “I bet you’ll have a wonderful Christmas, playing with your two little brothers and your new puppy,” I wrote to another child who had stated in his letter merely that he wanted an Xbox. “Have a happy holiday season AND a happy birthday on January 2^nd,” I cheerfully penned to a little girl whose birthday I happened to know.

And then I realized this wasn’t necessarily going so well. Santa told me I was going to scare kids by knowing so much about them. He in fact accused me of turning him into more of a Santa Stalker character than a jolly old elf.

As Santa and I continued through our pile of letters from kids with familiar names and addresses, I began to see why a little knowledge may in this case be a dangerous thing. “The reindeer love landing at your house because of that big open field right next door to you,” we wrote to one child. But farther down the pile we came to a letter from that same child’s younger brother, who wrote in block letters at the bottom of the page, “DON’T FORGET WE’LL BE AT OUR SKI HOUSE IN NEW HAMPSHIRE ON CHRISTMAS.” Oh no, I muttered as I scrabbled back through the pile to find the one I’d written to his sister, who I feared would now spend the remaining two weeks before Christmas certain that Santa would leave all her presents at the wrong house.

And there were also times when Santa had to rein in my tendency to lecture the kids a little. “Was it really sensible to wear shorts to school when it was thirty degrees out last week?” I wrote to one boy. Santa sternly explained to me that that simply isn’t the kind of thing he says to kids. He’s not anyone’s mother, he reminded me. He’s Santa.

It’s a little surprising Santa hired me for another season at all. But I’m grateful he’s giving me a second chance. Now that I know what I’m doing, I’ll exercise better self-restraint. Because it’s true: Santa does know when you’ve been sleeping; and he knows when you’re awake. But if he happens to also know that you left a crumpled sandwich wrapper on the table last time you ate at Ferns and ignored the recess aide when she said to put the balls back in the bin, it’s probably more in the holiday spirit if he keeps it to himself.

 

 

A seasonal battle with my conscience

Yes, I’ve already done a lot of Christmas shopping on line. And yes, I feel a little guilty about it.

But when I take a closer look at the guilt, it really just serves to remind me that there are very few ways of Christmas shopping that don’t make me feel guilty. The whole concept can just seem so self-indulgent, even if I’m shopping for other people.

At the same time, it’s so satisfying to point, click, and save myself a trip to….well, anywhere. A mall. A superstore. A plaza.

Last weekend, I was lucky to be in Portland for a couple of days.  So, having not shopped at all – on principle and by preference – on Black Friday, I actually did quite a lot of small-scale purchasing on Saturday. But that didn’t seem so bad. A far-reaching public relations campaign had dubbed the day “small business Saturday,” and it felt like that’s what I was supporting: small businesses. Even though I know many of the little unique-looking boutiques in Portland’s Old Port are actually small chains, with counterparts in other boutique-heavy communities like Edgartown, Nantucket, Chatham, and Portsmouth, I still felt like I was shopping the old-fashioned way, ducking in and out of little shops, carrying my purchases by hand rather than pushing a cart, aware that since I was car-free, I’d better not buy more than I could comfortably tote the several blocks back to the condo, on foot.

It did feel like the right way to shop, compared to the newspaper and TV images of people in line at big box stores on Black Friday. But my self-righteousness only goes so far. None of it was really necessary – not the little pieces of Christmas candy for the kids, the token gifts for friends, none of it. We could all celebrate Christmas with no gifts at all. But it was fun, and I was contributing in a very small way to local vendors and artisans, so I mollified myself with thoughts of how I was adding to the city’s economic development.

A few days later, though, I couldn’t resist plowing through most of the remainder of my gift list on line. I still had no desire to get into the car and drive anywhere to shop. And even though it pains my conscience to give so much business to Amazon rather than local businesses, it still doesn’t seem entirely wrong. I was saving carbon emissions by not driving anywhere. And, well, I was saving myself a lot of aggravation, which I would like to think benefits the world in other ways, though that may be a bit of a stretch.

But the reality is, there’s no one answer to whether it’s right or wrong to indulge in holiday shopping, and whether there are right ways or wrong ways to do it. Yes, any shopping supports employees somewhere – whether in Framingham or Bangladesh – who no doubt need the work. No, I still can’t begin to explain how buying stuff has anything whatsoever to do with the birth of Christianity. Yes, shopping on line means avoiding the environmental impact of driving. No, I don’t feel great about the often bizarre amount of disposable packaging in which each small item shipped from Amazon is swathed. Yes, I do understand that those “two-day shipping” promises exact a toll on the overworked employees required to fulfill the orders at breakneck speed.

But in a way, what I was left with was realizing, mostly, that there seldom are cut-and-dried answers when it comes to matters of the conscience. Yesterday on NPR I heard a debate about communities outlawing plastic shopping bags. A great idea, in my opinion – except the other side of it is that people end up buying plastic bags for things like lining wastebaskets and cleaning up after pets for which they previously used their old grocery bags. It’s easy to have strong opinions when you don’t give things much thought.

Last night after dinner, my ten-year-old sat down at my computer and designed a brochure advertising holiday services. According to the full-color printout she gave me, she’s willing to do tasks such as wrap presents, design cards, address cards, and “personalize gifts,” all for less than a dollar. I contracted her immediately to wrap and make cards for any gifts on my list that weren’t for her. It will run me about six dollars. That’s one form of Christmas spending I think I can do with a clear conscience. Possibly the only one, but it's something.

Seventy-five percent to Christmas

I’m about seventy-five percent ready for Christmas.

I’ve done about seventy-five percent of my Christmas shopping, but my Santa role requires me to take one or two more trips to the nearest retail hub.

I’m about seventy-five percent done with our Christmas cards, too: the newsletter-poem has been drafted and designed, and about one-third of those we’ll send out have been printed, but we need to make a Staples run for another printer cartridge and then print all the envelopes as well before they’re done.

My Christmas cooking and baking feels about seventy-five percent done. I’ve made truffles, toffee, peanut butter squares and peppermint bark for the candy assortments we make up for friends, neighbors and teachers, but I still have to make a peppermint cake for Rick’s office potluck later this week, and I need to make a couple of desserts for Christmas Eve as well.

The house itself seems about seventy-five percent to where I’d like it to be when Christmas Day arrives. It’s generally clean and tidy, but Holly’s room is still a disaster zone, and I definitely want to have it tidied up by Christmas. Not to her standards; to mine, which means I’ll be doing the tidying more or less on my own. Plus there’s one laundry basket of clean sheets and towels yet to fold.

Christmas is six days away. That last twenty-five percent niggles a little bit, but I’ll get there. It’s not such a bad position to be in right now. Christmas is, after all, only as complicated as you make it. The idea that we need to include four kinds of homemade candy rather than two or three, or that Holly’s room must be neat when Christmas morning dawns, or even what should be included in the kids’ stockings, is an idea entirely of my own construct, I realize.

What does it really take to celebrate Christmas? An eagerness to embrace the holiday, whether that means with all its religious significance or rather Christmas as a cultural celebration of family, friends and feasting.

There are plenty of people in the world without children for whom to buy stocking stuffers, parties for which to make desserts, family members for whom to plan a holiday dinner. Christmas festivities are ultimately whatever you make of them. I’m making a lot out of Christmas because I can. And that makes the final twenty-five percent feel entirely worthwhile, no matter how much it may seem to hang over my head.

O Christmas card, O Christmas card....

Due to various circumstances -- most of which fall under the category of personal laziness -- I hadn't been to the post office in three consecutive days when my 9-year-old and I finally stopped by yesterday afternoon. Our post office box was packed with envelopes. The two of us unstuffed it piece by piece, hauled the load home, and spent a very pleasant half-hour opening Christmas cards. As I should have realized, if you're going to take a three-day hiaitus from collecting your mail, mid-December is not the optimal time to do it; on a typical day during the holiday season, we receive as much personal mail as we often receive in an entire month or more at other times of year.

But it was worth it, because catching up on the trove of cards that had arrived during that time was so much fun. I know a lot of people don't enjoy Christmas cards as much as I do, but for me it's a hallmark of the season. And even though lots of satirists have fun poking fun at the different strains of holiday greetings, I can only say that I like them all. I like the posed, professionally produced family portraits. I like the funny offbeat candid snapshots of kids running through pumpkin patches or digging sand castles. I like those taken in people's back yards and those taken at the far reaches of the earth. I like seeing what people did in Disney World, at Niagara Falls, on Mount Kilimanjaro, in the Caribbean. I like those that were clearly intended to be Christmas cards as the shot was composed and those that have more of an "I guess this one will do" feel to them.

I like holiday newsletters, too. I don't mind when people go on and on about every twist and turn in their family's year. Perhaps because personal stories and how people tell them are such an integral part of my career, I'm interested not only in the facts people include but the subtext about what they chose to say and why. One of my friends wrote a fairly long newsletter but had exactly one paragraph about each child and one detail amplified in that one paragraph: a daughter learned to drive; a son started working at his school's radio station; another daughter is going to be in a play soon. How did she choose those singular details?, I wondered. Were there other ideas that she cast aside?

A few details that friends have chosen to include in the past struck me as unusual enough that I still remember them years later. One friend broke the news of her divorce, apologizing ahead of time for breaking the unspoken rule of including only good news in Christmas cards. Two different women I know who are both mothers of men in their 20's routinely discuss the goings-on of their sons' girlfriends, which I find a little odd -- these aren't even members of the family. But it's still interesting. One of my husband's childhood friends even once started a Christmas card with "Thank God that for once we don't have to start with the news that Tina is pregnant."

Our own Christmas card situation has me annually tearing my hair out. I decided the first year Rick and I were married to write a 12-stanza poem describing our year. It was a fun way to narrate events, and I discovered that the kind of people who complain in general about holiday newsletters don't seem to mind poems because of the poems' innate tongue-in-cheek quality: we're not boasting about anything, we're just trying to come up with rhyming couplets. After we’d done two years of holiday poems, a friend of my mother very offhandedly told me an anecdote about a young woman she knew who had done the same thing for a few years but then found it too hard to maintain the tradition. Needless to say, I took this as a challenge, and that's the primary reason that our holiday poem continues to exist nineteen years later. Now a small number of our friends even write little rhymes back to us.

In the past, we threw in a photo card as well, assuming that some recipients would read the poem, some would look at the card, and some might do neither. (Or both.) But as home-computer technology has improved, the cost of commercial printing has gone up, and the environmental impact of photographic dyes and materials has come into question, we ceased ordering glossy photos and just started embedding small snapshots into our newsletter.

It's one of those traditions I love for about 11 1/2 months out of the year, and then dread when it's time to start writing. But as with any big writing project I face, the sense of relief I have when it's behind me makes all the stress seem worthwhile. As Holly and I pored over the pile of cards we received yesterday, I thought about how those same people would be receiving ours in another few days. I hope they enjoy our work as much as I've enjoyed theirs. Because every single card I receive means something to me, and I hope it's a tradition that never stops.

It takes a child (or several) to raise a village

To be sure, there is wisdom in the adage that it takes a village to raise a child. But last night at Carlisle’s Christmas on the Common, I couldn’t help but think it also takes a child to raise a village.

For the past several years, I’ve been on the serving crew for this annual event, meaning that I arrive early and help arrange cookies on platters and get the hot chocolate urns in place. While the audience is outside singing Christmas carols, admiring the town tree and awaiting Santa, I start pouring hot chocolate into Styrofoam cups to be ready for the crowds as soon as they pour in after Santa’s arrival by firetruck.

I used to feel important in this role. Not only did it involve the aforementioned tasks but also overseeing a small team of grade school aged children who every year asked to “help” at the event. Part of the work of the small crew of adults present was to supervise and oversee these young helpers.

But last night, I noticed something: the helpers I’d been working with for the past few years can pretty much run the show on their own now. They no longer need adult supervision and instruction; in fact, they no longer need adult assistance at all. Middle schoolers now, they know the ropes.

So they do their part by providing labor for the event, and the little kids, the grade schoolers and preschoolers and toddlers, do their part by adding enchantment to the evening. They stare at the tree, sing the carols, and watch with mouths agape as the processional heads up Church Street: first the police cars with blue lights flashing, then the antique fire truck, with Santa waving and his five elves posing. The kids cheer and yell, and then they pour into the church hall for hot chocolate and cookies and photos with Santa.

It’s a quintessential old-fashioned small-town event. Everyone who attends has a wonderful time, and it’s the kind of evening that underscores the ways in which Carlisle can sometimes – though not always – feel like a cozy village. But these events wouldn’t occur without children present, the younger ones and the older ones alike. So in that respect, it takes children to raise a village.

I don’t mean to suggest that communities without children don’t have their own rituals of cheer. Retirement communities, subdivisions restricted to adults, college dorms, even nursing homes and graduated care facilities: they too have their times of merriment. But in a case like this, it’s the children who bring the community together. During my stint serving hot chocolate alongside the middle schoolers who were really doing most of the work, I saw among the revelers three adults who do not have children. In a small way I was surprised they attended, but also not; it was a jolly evening for everyone. But it made me think about how the presence of the children had drawn out even these non-parents to join in the fun.

So it takes a village to raise a child, and it takes children to make a village. Community, in the most meaningful sense, happens best when all ages work together. Last night, that included babies to be admired; little kids thrilled by the holiday mood; older kids happy to help out (and happy to posture for each other as they did so); adults to pull it all together. At times like this, we are a community with the spirit of a small-town village. And sometimes it takes children to make that happen to its best potential.

Another annual tradition: Thankyou notes at Starbucks

Three years ago, in an office gift swap, I received a $10 Starbucks card, and so was born one of my favorite Christmas traditions. Actually, it’s a post-Christmas, pre-New Year’s tradition: sort of a Boxing Day tradition, or a Gap Week tradition, one that falls sometime in the lazy, unstructured days between Christmas and New Year’s. We used the gift card that first year and have done it on our own dime ever since, but it’s well worth the money I spend. For a couple of hours one afternoon in the days following Christmas, the kids and I head to our local Starbucks with stationery and pens in hand, buy ourselves cups of hot chocolate topped with whipped cream, and settle in at a table to write our thankyou notes.

For Christmas season of 2009, yesterday was official Thankyou Notes at Starbucks Day, and I was amazed by our productivity. Accessories always help: this year Santa had brought each of the kids personalized memo pads. Tim’s notes were yellow and blue, with a catcher’s mitt and baseball next to his name at the top of each sheet; Holly’s depict a slightly hallucinogenic garden scene, with oversized butterflies and ladybugs wending amidst Technicolor flowers and her full three-part name, just the way she likes it, printed across the top. I had my list of whom to thank for what faithfully recorded on my Palm, which I put in the center of the table for all to consult, and we got to work.

The kids write very simple thankyou notes, but I can’t blame them much. They were lucky to have received presents from a lot of different people, and it was more important to me that they get a lot of notes written than that each one be a gem of creative self-expression. As long as they get one or two sentences past “Thank you for the blank,” I consider it a job reasonably well done. Halfway through the ten or so notes they each needed to write (Holly had one more than Tim because her teacher had given her a gift), they finished their hot chocolate, but I was so impressed with their dedication to the project that I let them each return to the counter for a pastry. A cup of cocoa and an apple fritter versus not having to nag about thankyou notes for the rest of the season? No contest, in my mind.

I like to think that this yearly exercise imparts to them not only that thankyou notes are important but that they are an inevitable part of celebrating Christmas and receiving gifts. We don’t spend a lot of time discussing it; we just go do it. But I also like the thought that the hot chocolate and pastries makes it more fun than tedious. And I like the idea that maybe they’re absorbing some of the pleasure of sitting at a Starbucks to read or write, one of my most treasured but least often experienced indulgences. I dream that someday they’ll ask to come back to Starbucks to sit quietly and read or write even when it’s not Christmas gap week.

Instilling the idea that there’s far more to Christmas than Christmas presents is something a lot of parents struggle with, and I always say the best way to do it is not to downplay the gifts but to “up-play” the many other traditions of the Christmas season. For us, Starbucks Afternoon is one such tradition. Today, I’ll address the envelopes and mail off all their notes, plus the few that I wrote, having not taken in the haul my kids did. I have no illusions that the recipients of the notes will be bowled over with the kids’ writing talent nor even necessarily with their sincerity; these are very rudimentary expressions of gratitude. But I do think the kids are learning about an important part of basic etiquette, and I hope they’re learning that the basics, like thankyou notes, can even be fun.