Christmas will soon be here and I have seen so many people talking about letters from Santa, Elf of the Shelf and so on. I absolutely love Christmas traditions and I think it’s important to do something the same every year with your family to make Christmas that bit more special for everyone. However, there will be no letters from Santa or Elf on the Shelf in the O’Halloran household.
All too often I have seen or heard parents threatening their children that if they’re not good then Santa won’t bring them any presents. I don’t want to be the parent that screams at their child to be good. I have seen and heard parents threatening their children that Christmas will be cancelled. I can only imagine how many of these parents do actually get their children presents for Christmas. I won’t say it’s everyone because I’m there is a small percentage that keep to their word.
Personally, I feel as though the idea behind the ‘naughty or nice’ list from Santa is wrong. I want to be able to teach Erin that it’s important to be a nice person in general, not just because you get presents if you are nice all year. I don’t want to use empty threats either. I want to teach Erin that lying is wrong and how can I do that when I would be doing exactly that. How do you teach a child that doing something bad or naughty is wrong if you don’t follow through on a punishment?
Things like this are really hard because while we feel like this I know the majority of Erin’s friends growing up will all be told something different to her. How do we explain to her why her friends believe in something different? Luckily, we have a bit of time until we really have to think about these things. Christmas shouldn’t be this complicated though. Christmas is supposed to be a magical, fun time and I don’t want it to be led by what we have or haven’t told Erin.
I also hate the idea of the Elf on the Shelf. Does no one else think it would be creepy as hell having something watching over you all of the time? I think if it were me, I would be terrified of doing anything wrong at all, no matter how small it was. Again, Christmas is supposed to be a magical and fun time. I don’t want to scare the crap out of Erin by having an evil looking little elf follow her around the house all month! I can imagine children having nightmares, worrying about whether or not they have been good enough.
I know that we’re in the minority here with this, and that’s okay. Everyone has different parenting styles and this is ours. Christmas will still be a really special time in our house and we’ll just find our own traditions as Erin gets older.