Reply to If you are a non religious household, how do you handle religious holidays or Santa, etc?

Forum Index » Family Relationships

Reply to "If you are a non religious household, how do you handle religious holidays or Santa, etc?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
You need to broaden your mind and understand the end goal, OP.

Judeo-Christianism is what the Western world was founded on. From a purely cultural point of view, it is important to understand its main ideas, tenets, most notable texts, and citations thereof, as references to it will pop up everywhere, from the great classics to the most absurd pop memes to dinner conversations with people you may wish to impress. It's hard to fully appreciate the heart-wrenching ending of Dicken's A Tale of Two Cities, if you don't know the corresponding Bible quotations.

Your children need to know their cultural background. Period. It's like selling them on Shakespearean insults to make them read some Shakespeare, or telling them what Archimedes said in the bath to make the math more palatable. All this is CULTURALLY IMPORTANT. And then you can springboard to all other major religions they need to know about for their own professional and personal benefit. Children learn best when they hear stories, so I suggest you start their religious education with the stories from the Bible. Similarly, you can tell them about Darwin's crippling anxiety and how it affected his work, or how Edison was a lying grifter no one liked. Facts are made more palatable with human interest!

I've always insisted to my kids that Father Christmas comes to give presents, but with that special tone of voice I reserve for Transparent Mommy Whoppers, of which I have many, so my kids always had great fun pointing out all the ways he could never get around the world in time, and were never upset that they had initially believed me. But then I read them the Chronicles of Narnia when they were little, and various other stories like it - they've always understood that you can hope something is real on some level, all the while knowing that here in the real world, we have some unfortunate space-time limitations. In literature, it's called suspension of disbelief.

[/quote]
So now Santa is part of some magnificent Eurocentric corpus? I think the less we focus on the west and Europe the better.[/quote]

PP you replied to. I am Asian and European. Not American. They have cards in Japan with little Father Christmases on them. Halloween, originally a celtic new year event, is celebrated all over the world.

You don’t realize that cultures and beliefs are malleable and easily adoptable and that there is no clash of cultures except in the minds of ignorant, fearful people.  Living in the West, it’s self-evident that you should teach your kids the underpinnings of their countries’ traditions. It doesn’t need to conflict at all with the rest of the stuff you want them to know. My Russian Godmother gave me books of Russian myths, my mother read West African folktales to me, my Asian relatives brought me to Shinto shrines... the more culturally aware you can makes your kids, the better off they are.

And it starts by not rejecting any one culture. 
[/quote]
So what?  Myths are still myths in whatever culture.  Feel free to live in imaginary-land though.  Superstition is for the weak minded.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics