Before having children Janelle Durham remembers visiting one of her brothers for the holidays. “Based on our experiences growing up, we were used to the ‘one person opens a present at a time, we all ooh and ahh over it’ thing.” Another visiting relative had picked out a special book for each of that brother’s children, and was hoping to be able to talk about why he loved the book and had chosen it for them. “We had this whole expectation about what the holiday would look like,” she notes.
But her brother had adopted a new practice. Piles and piles of presents were stacked under the tree, but his five kids weren’t allowed to touch them until Christmas morning. “At 7 a.m., all five children descended,” she says.
“It was like a feeding frenzy. It was over in 10 minutes, and then it was like, ‘Well, what do we do with the rest of the day?’”
Once she had her own children — Martin, Isabel, and Ben – she thought back to her own childhood, and decided to reclaim the tradition of taking things slowly. On Christmas morning, they do a leisurely gift exchange, where each person receives exactly one gift.
“We tell all the adults who are coming, ‘One,’ Durham laughs. ‘ONE gift!’” During the exchange, family members take turns.
It goes like this: “Okay, it’s Bela’s turn – we call grandmother Abuela “Bela,” says Durham. “We all go ‘Who did Bela get a gift from? Oh, Martin got the gift for Bela!’”
The whole family watches Bela open the gift, and then Martin explains why he got that gift for his grandmother.
“It’s funny,” Durham says, “There’s only about a dozen gifts that get given and it takes a couple hours to open them all.”
For Durham, “It’s much more about connection than it is about consumerism. The gifts are the excuse for what we’re doing. The main focus is more on the social time and the connection than it is on what’s in the package.”
Durham teaches parent education at Bellevue College. “One of my core things as a parent educator is: there’s no one right way to parent. So I never tell anyone else that this is the way to do gift-giving, right? Because it’s what works for my family. What I want everyone to do is be intentional about what their goals are.
“At holiday time, it’s easy to get swept up in other people’s traditions. ‘This is what I did when I grew up,’ or ‘This is what somebody on Pinterest does,’ or ‘This is what my friends on Facebook do.’” Trying to keep up can get exhausting during the holidays.
Instead, Durham tells parents: “Think about what gives it meaning to you and do those things. If making a meal gives meaning to you, hooray. If it doesn’t, you can get a holiday meal from Whole Foods.”
For years, Durham idealized her childhood memories of going to the Christmas tree stand and picking out the perfect tree to decorate at home. Ornaments were a beloved tradition, because before her passing, Durham’s mother chose an ornament to give each grandchild every year.
But after a few years she came to the realization that getting a tree from the tree stand and bringing it home was, she says, “a pain in the butt.”
“What I like is putting the ornaments on, because every ornament has a story and a memory. So I told my family, just get me a tree that you pull out of the box. You fold down the branches. You plug it in. That’s done. And then we get to do the fun part!”
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