Should you have a productive holiday or a happy holiday?
Yes.
Its possible to have an extraordinary Christmas year after year, as part of building your extraordinary family.
In this transmission we continue our charming Steader tradition of treating holidays, joy, and celebration just a little bit like an engineering problem. But in a fun way!
None of these are mission-critical. You can have an abundant, bountiful multigenerational family without them. They are though guaranteed to work.
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Lights
The days are drawing in. The pure winter nights start early. So lights make a big impact. If you do it tastefully (or not), being the family that leans in to Christmas lights is great if your neighbors mostly don’t go all out. In our experience, hanging the lights yourself as a family carries more impact and usually even looks better.
Along those lines, Christmas is the best time of year to have a real wood fire.
Traditions
Embrace traditions that arise organically
Embrace heritage
When creating traditions—its fine to create traditions—look for things that tie into your family concepts or into aspects of the holiday. If you are inventing a tradition, better to invent a snow fight or caroling tradition than a Studio Ghibli tradition. https://steader.substack.com/p/beachsteading-and-slopesteading Not that there’s anything wrong at all with Studio Ghibli
Do things that are repeatable
Someone at tension with repeatability, do things that feel adventurous
Include work and service traditions, not just play
Do things that have cultural reinforcement, but that you do more than others, so the cultural reinforcement builds your family concept. Leaning in to old-fashioned Christmas traditions is an extremely good idea.
Let us put in a plug for Christmas tree cutting as a wonderful tradition. It feels adventurous, gets you out into nature, has something of the nature of an expedition (people love expeditions), and is a form of primary production.
Home production
Speaking of primary production ….
We strongly advise having at least some aspect of your Christmas be home-produced, ideally with multiple members of the family contributing.
The base level is home cooking. Make a Christmas meal.
Learning to bake bread is a lasting skill that never fails to impress. Homemade rolls can make a Christmas feast.
Even better is to rebundle the supply chain and grow or raise some of the food that you home cook for your holiday feast. If you don’t have the turkey or goose or pig to slaughter for this year, then do it next!
But for now, what about making sauerkraut—is there a use for sauerkraut in your Christmas meal? It’s great on a salad or cooked with greenbeans. Sauerkraut is easy to make. So are pickles.
Homemade beef jerky makes a great gift or stocking stuffer.
Gifts
The foundation of any good multi-generational family is the husband and wife. Put some time and thought into your gifts for each other.
For children, good qualities in a gift include
productive—children love tools because it makes them feel capable (which they are). One of us this year is getting 7-year old doll fanatic some cloth and patterns to make doll clothes. This doesn’t have to be a big thing. You can literally make Barbie clothes with scissors, scraps, and hot glue.
aspirational
Propagandistic—pregnant dolls heck yes, Skipper babysitter you bet
Identity forming
Beautiful
High Quality
Improving
You should also buy the first ever natalist kids’ book “Yes, Our Family Is the Best.” Our goal is to have the hard copy available for purchase in time for Christmas.
Here are gift suggestions for boys
Here are a couple of book ideas for girls (or, really, for anyone)
Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861) Fascinating.
Kristen Lavransdotter, Tiina Nunnally translation
Gardening gift idea of the year:
(We don’t get anything from these links).
Transcendence
Transcendence is one of the highest of human experiences and the Christmas seasons has a lot of opportunities for it. You should lean into religion and transcendence as much as you possibly can. This is an area where the mainstream paradigm simply cannot compete at all. The field is uncontested, all you have to do is show up.
Look up at the starry sky in the crisp air. Light a candle. Sing. Tell your children what’s important to you. Talk to your children about a little baby in a stable long ago and your own experience with them being born. You can’t make transcendence happen willy-nilly, but you can seek it with a good heart, and it will come.
For those of you who are still feeling your way around religion, give this substack a read
Happiness
You can’t engineer happiness. It is not a manufacture. But like a gardener, you can prepare the soil and plant the seeds, and the growth will come.
The soil for Christmas happiness is traditions, time together, telling stories, reminiscing, and time together. Big splashy fun is great as an occasional icebreaker, but parlor games and just time together are the real keys.
Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all you steaders.
Thank you for these insights. Living in a colder climate, where the night starts at 4pm. this time of year, I've learned to appreciate Christmas lights like I never had in the warmer climate of my youth. And yes, I agree, it's more meaningful to do it yourself.
Merry Christmas