Being Weird

Sometimes Mr Smith and I get the same wacky idea and it sticks.

Our poor children… What they have to put up with…

Introducing:
Our Weird Christmas.

The tale actually begins the year before.
[All the pictures here are from that year, too.]

The whole month of December 2016 was pretty much miserable. I’m exaggerating, but the overall feeling was pretty yuck. Why?

We had several kids fixated on a few things they were excited about getting for Christmas, and they
would
not
let
up
about it.

Every day. Multiple times a day.

“Is it Christmas yet?
“Do you think I’ll get a whateveritwas?
“When is it Christmas?
“I want it to be Christmas nooooooowwwwwww.”

It got so old, so fast.

This is just NOT what Christmas should be about.

We tried gently teaching, coaching, coaxing them out of their annoying gift-centered-ness. Eventually, of course, we pulled the “Knock it off already or you ain’t getting NOTHIN’ for Christmas!”

Actually selfie on 12/25/2017:

We vowed we were NOT having another Christmas season like that.

But how do we change it? Do we just abandon the whole holiday altogether? Mmm, no. That’s not what we want for our family. Not quite. I totally get it when Christians abandon holidays with pagan traditions and I completely respect it — but I’m not there yet. I love the whole magical Christmas thing. I love having a month to celebrate the Savior’s birth. I want it to be about Jesus, though, not Santa.

Good luck with that one, right?

So last January,
Mr Smith and I decided
we were going to shake it up 2017.

We were going to do “the present thing” on some mysterious date, some time after Thanksgiving but before Dec25. Get it over with early. Spend the rest of the month enjoying all the Jesus-ness of Christmas and focus more on giving, more on service, more on love and joy and the real stuff and less on the “me me me me me” that kids are so good at. Jesus wasn’t born on the 25th of December anyway, so does the date really matter?

We told the kids about it in July so they’d know way in advance.

It didn’t go quite like we’d envisioned it — I originally thought we’d do “Smithmas” in early December, but it ended up being more like mid-month. Meh, oh well.

Verdict: I loved it.

It was great fun surprising them with “Ta-Da! It’s Smithmas! YAY!!!”
– and I loved, loved, loved how the next week or two leading up to the 25th were so peaceful.

All the kids were just mellow and happy. I enjoyed everything more because the big stressful huzzah was behind us, and I could just celebrate the miracle of a perfect baby being born to live a perfect life and die a perfect sacrifice for us.

Full disclosure: I don’t think I/we did a very good job communicating that part to the kids. Definitely room for improvement next December.

You’d think with all that peacefulness in between “Smithmas” and Christmas, I could have pulled together a Christmas card and/or little tokens of gratitude for our amazing neighbors who so patiently put up with us all year. But nope. It didn’t happen. (Sorry, neighbors!)

So what about the actual Christmas?

We did our normal Christmas Eve traditions on the 24th, reading and acting out Luke 2, and doing the “find the nut in the jello” family present thing. (It was the absolute craziness reenactment they’ve ever done.)

Christmas morning we had a special breakfast and later that day we did the traditional family beach trip, with the traditional “What? Do we HAVE to go to the beach, really?” complaining from most of the children beforehand.

I know. It’s so, so wrong that they whine about going to the beach. I don’t know what’s wrong with them. But that’s what they do.

All in all, it was lovely. I really liked it.

2016, it was fun but the overall feeling was:

 2017, it was fun and the overall feeling was:

I’m not 100% sure we’ll do “Smithmas” again next year. Maybe we’ll try being normal again, or (more likely) maybe we’ll think of something even more weird.