I have lived in this huge apartment/condo complex for around ten years now and this is the first time the management has ever sent out an alert regarding vandalism from the children who live here. The notice said that children have damaged the plants and beautiful landscaping that was put in last month, and they have been getting into the laundry and damaging the washing machines and dryers. Also, they have been playing around the cars in the parking garages and in the driveways, which has long been forbidden. The management has now threated to evict any family whose children damage property.
This complex has a large swimming pool, a kiddie wading pool, an indoor basketball court, a gymnasium, a billiards room, a party room, several outdoor grills and picnic tables where people have parties and birthday parties, and lots of grass to play on. In the summers, the management provides a free camp for young children involving games, crafts, sport tournaments, and other activities.
But ever since the first lockdown in mid march, due to Coved all these facilities have been closed. The quad is really a ghost town most of the day. I hardly ever see an adult at all. I do see children after 3:00 when “home schooling” ends for the day, but it is hard for them to find places to play, thus they are in the garages and I guess in the planters, and so on. Also, I am certain their parents are under various stresses and that affects children as well.
This year there was no summer, no beach, no family summer trip, no birthday parties, no Halloween, no Thanksgiving, and now the biggest of all, the “cancelling of Christmas” to whatever extreme that really means. I’ve been getting in the mail gift catalogues featuring photos of beaming children on Christmas morning getting the toys that wanted, and adults, too, photos of a happy Dad with his new golf driver or a smiling Mom with something beautiful for the home or to wear.
Children thrive on ritual…and adults, too. When I think over my own childhood, there were dozens of things we had to have each year or something was wrong. Here are just a few examples.
For my birthdays, my mother would take us and my friends to a local amusement park. It was like our own tiny Disneyland and we never got tired of it. My two sisters and brother had summer birthdays, so their parties involved diving for pennies in the swimming pool and having barbecues outside by the pool
Always every summer the family go out into the woods for a picnic, and weekly our mother would take us to the beach at Santa Cruz to play in the waves.
If we took a driving trip across country to visit our relatives in North Carolina, we loved it whenever there was a “bumpy ride” where the highway went way up and down, Dad would drive faster than normal because the thrill ride made us all scream and laugh. Our parents would stop at every “see the hila monster” or “rattlesnake”, whatever junk attraction there was in some small town off the road. When it was very hot, there was always that obligatory stop at Dairy Queen.
At least once every month, the family would go to the drive-in movie and we would wear our pajamas.
On Thanksgiving, each one of us had to have one of those turkey candles at our place setting and loved to see whose turkey would remain burning the longest (you know some of those were fickle birds!). That was always a heated contest, even our father got in on it, to the extent that one Thanksgiving, my brother’s and or father’s candle was still burning after we finished our meal, so we kept it burning on the dining room table while we went into the family room to watch the annual “Wizard of Oz” on television. When it was time to get dessert, Mom saw that the dining room table was on fire due to those turkey candles that had gone on the loose! We have no idea who won that contest that year, but the dining room table wore its newly-created tattoo for the rest of its useful life.
Speaking of fire hazards, every Fourth of July Mom and Dad would get us a huge “block party” fireworks kit and Dad would put up on the tennis court a complex of ladders for attaching various spinning fireworks to and we had the neighbors and friends come over for the festivities and we all would all have hot cider and hot dogs. Mom armed us all with numerous sparklers that we loved to toss far up in the air. Apparently one Fourth of July somebody’s sparker ended up buried in the tanbark that was all over the ground near there and there it continued to smolder for years! Mom kept a garden hose dripping in the vicinity of that slow burn, which would slowly migrate across the landscape, but never actually burned out. She said that for sure she was on some fireman’s “bad list”, since the Fourth of July block parties and throwing the sparklers up in the air never abated.
Christmas of course had its own long list of must-does. For example, we had to have an advent calendar, the Christmas count-down had to begin. Naturally we all were involved in decorating the Christmas tree (some years we had more than one in the house) and Mom had to decorate everything in a Christmas theme—pillows on the couches that she had made and towels in the bathrooms and Christmas themed plates and drinking glasses and things hanging on every doorknob and Christmas lights all around outside. Christmas music played all day throughout the house and also outside. Of course we had to get in the car and go all over everywhere (Atherton where we lived, and Menlo Park, and Palo Alto) to see the Christmas lights. We read all the dozens of Christmas cards that our parents would get from friends from all around the country; we children new who all those people were. When Christmas was over, we read all the Christmas cards again and then had the ritual of burning them in the fire place one at a time (sending all those good wishes up into the ethers). We had fire burning in all the fire places in the house, which means in the living room, the bar, the kitchen, the family room, our parents’ room, and outside by the pool. What’s Christmas without a fire in a fireplace in almost every room?
We children would spend hours lying on the floor by the Christmas tree and would look at the gorgeously wrapped presents that were there and if it had our name on it, we tried to guess what it was. These were presents from Mom and Dad and each other, as well as gifts from our friends and friends of our parents and certain relatives.
Christmas Eve, we kids were just too wound up to stand it, so Mom dropped us off at a movie theater and every year we would marvel how it was light when we went into the theater and dark when we came back out after the movie. Then the family ate dinner at a restaurant called “Gale’s” in Menlo Park, which, sadly, no longer exists. It always had to be Gales for Christmas eve dinner, just because.
We children were allowed to open just ONE present before going to bed that night, and it had to be from one of the siblings. Obviously the presents from Santa Clause would arrive sometime in the night. Dad would get up on the roof and stomp around and say “Ho Ho Ho, Merry Christmas!” (we figured out who it had been years later). That was magical for me even when I was old enough to learn the “truth” about Santa Clause, because I believed and still do.
We made a big deal of leaving cookies and milk for Santa. When Mom got into health food, Santa got “Tiger’s milk”, because he needed to have strength for his mission of giving toys to all the boys and girls. (P.S. In our family, it wasn’t “good children” and “bad children”—all Children deserved love from Santa Clause.) And every Christmas morning we made sure that Santa had left us a thank-note for the delicious cookies and the empowering Tiger’s Milk.
I think back on these things, and so much more, and appreciate how glorious and powerful our childhood was, and how our rituals wove together the whole family and actually the whole culture. And Christmas was especially powerful, so that its power lasted within far into my adulthood. I think it remained in our mother’s heart all her life. Fortunately, we all were mostly able to get together every year, even though there had been a lot of moving about so that no longer were we children living near each other, or near our parents. But we would drive, fly, or take a train to be together whenever possible, which was most of the time.
Ritual keeps you whole, moral, caring, and always getting wiser. Messing with this is destructive. And I think when cherished rituals are messed with, it is the children who are the first to crack. It is like the rug is pulled out from under them, quickly or slowly, and they no longer feel secure about where they are anymore. And absolutely they need to play. That is really their main job and requirement, playing, and what I say about toys is that toys are a child’s tools. They need those in order to accomplish and to grow up.
Everybody must be aware of not letting precious rituals slip away. And when the children crack, you will be next, and somewhere before that is the time to say “enough”. Do not let whom you were get taken over, but proudly grab onto it will all your might. You are the sovereign.
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