Caillou Christmas

The week leading up to Christmas, the kids were watching Caillou, a PBS kids show. For those of you who don't frequent PBS kids television, Caillou is a cartoon featuring a preschooler (Caillou) and his family. It's generally innocuous entertainment for the kids.

In this particular episode, Caillou's pre-school class was having a "holiday party." At one point in the show, Caillou says he's excited about the class "Christmas party." His mother immediately corrects him: "O no, Caillou, this is a holiday party." She goes on to explain that there are other holidays during this season and that there are kids in his class who celebrate those holidays.

A couple of parenting thoughts as I've been considering this exchange and what it teaches my kids.

1. This is as it ought to be. PBS can't elevate Christmas over the other holidays, nor should they. In other words, it is not PBS's job to teach my kids about the centrality of Christmas. That's my job.

To change the venue a bit, it's also not the public school's job to teach my children about the importance of Christmas. I wouldn't want even a Christian teacher in a public school to ignore the other holidays and the students under their care who celebrate those holidays.

2. At the same time, given that my faith commitments are to Christianity and not pluralism, I don't want Christmas simply lined up with every other possible holiday celebration. I want my kids to be able to engage other faith commitments (be it Judaism or pluralism) from the starting point of God's work in Christ, not from a pretend neutral center that does not actually exist.

3. So I want my kids to be able to engage with humility and gentleness the other celebrations around Christmas through the lense of Christmas. I want them to be firmly fixed on the certain good news that God has acted decisively in human history through the coming, working, dying and resurrection of Jesus Christ at a single point in time and history.

I want them to be able to see how this coming of Christ actually fulfills all the hopes and dreams and desires and partial-celebrations of Kwanzaa and (C)Hanuk(k)ah (thanks, Daniel). But I don't want that to create this un-necessarily intense bifurcation of we're the "good guys" and everyone else are the "bad guys."

4. But as Fowler has mapped, there are stages of faith. It takes emotional and intellectual maturity to be able to hold convictions firmly while also able to enter into the complexity of the world graciously and humbly--the best of us don't usually get there until mid-life!

So where does that leave my wife, me and our five-year-old, three-year-old (today! happy birthday, Zoe!), and 16-month old?

We have to teach them and equip them as best we can to live in a fairly complex, multi-cultural world from the viewpoint of Christian faith. We have to take opportunity to explain things as best we can, with language as best as they can grasp it, all the while praying a ton for wisdom and for the Spirit to do the work that only the Spirit can do.

We could also lock them up in a closet until they're 21, but I think that might be a bit of an over-reaction.