Christmas Adventures

By Barbara Frank

As a homeschool mom, I've always found certain aspects of Christmas especially challenging. Take gifts, for example. I brought the kids along when I went shopping for gifts for the relatives. But of course, I couldn't take them along for their own presents. Instead, I'd sneak out alone at night when my husband was home. Sometimes he'd pick up toys we'd discussed ahead of time on his way home from work. Our shopping for the kids was done in odd moments here and there during the months before Christmas, so that by the time the big day arrived, we were tired of all the subterfuge.

That's not such a problem for parents whose kids are in school, since they can go out while the kids are in class. But it wasn't easy for us, and to add to it, we had to figure out where to hide those gifts until Christmas, and in such a way that the kids, who were always around, didn't see us. We stumbled on to the solution for that problem when the kids were small. We stored the presents in the trunk of my husband's car, and then, late at night when the kids were asleep, we bagged the gifts in black trash bags and hid them in the crawlspace.

The bags were practically invisible there. For years, we thought we'd been successful in keeping this hiding place a secret, but my eldest eventually told me, "We knew they were down there, Mom, but nobody wanted to crawl through the musty gravel bad enough to find out what they were."

Another difficulty we had was with the Santa thing. We encouraged our first two children to believe that Santa brought presents because that's how we were raised. Since our kids weren't in preschool, no one told them the truth about Santa. In fact the neighbor kids, their best friends at that time, couldn't spill the beans because they believed, too. (They didn't go to preschool either.)

However, there was a problem with this. By ages 6 and 7, our kids still believed in Santa, but could think logically enough that they began questioning me closely about how the jolly old elf was getting into the house each year, particularly because we didn't have a fireplace, and our skinny chimney went straight into the furnace.

Things finally came to a head one December day while we were eating lunch. Both kids peppered me with questions related to their conclusion that if Santa could get into our locked house, so could burglars. When I said, "Maybe Daddy leaves the door unlocked for Santa," my daughter got very upset at the thought that the front door would be unlocked on Christmas Eve. (We lived in the Chicago area at that time, and always locked the doors.) She became tearful, and her brother looked like he was heading that way himself, so that's when I decided enough was enough.

I went to the other room to call my husband at work, described our lunchtime conversation, and we decided I should tell the kids the truth, which I did. I don't remember their reaction, other than my daughter's relief that the front door would be locked on Christmas Eve, just like every other night.

By the time our younger children were growing up, we were smarter and wanted to avoid the Santa trap. But the big kids perpetuated the Santa myth with the younger kids, so we just tried not to make a big deal out of the whole thing and it eventually passed...except for the fact that we now have a developmentally delayed 15-year-old who not only believes in Santa, but wants to be Santa, thanks to the movie "The Santa Clause." Sigh. So yes, I wish we'd never started the whole Santa thing.

Being homeschoolers meant that my children never experienced a classroom Christmas party. But they did go to parties at church, Scouts and with our homeschool group. I recall many outings to nursing homes for caroling, and one particularly moving visit to a home for Alzheimer's patients, where I watched patients with tears in their eyes happily listen to our daughter and two other children playing Christmas music on their violins.

At home our kids made Christmas cookies and candy for neighbors and friends, decorations for our home, and presents for their parents and each other. They carefully set out our Nativity scenes, always with the greatest care. My favorite is the set I made out of cloth and fiberfill when the oldest was tiny. It brings back so many happy memories of those years!

It's different at Christmas time now. Our older kids live in other states. Our younger kids are teens. We'll be spending Christmas Eve in a centrally located hotel room so we can all meet up, instead of celebrating Christmas at home without some of our children.

We were so used to being around each other every day, thanks to homeschooling, that it's been a tough adjustment (especially for me!) since the older kids left home. But within a few minutes of greeting each other after having been apart for months, it's just like old times again.

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Christmas Adventures