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Living in the Light: Dancing Daze — Creating Celebrations Anne R. Stone Anne Stone has been writing books for children for over twenty years. She has studied history, religions, psychology, and languages extensively. In 1997 she founded the Institute of Higher Sciences, which currently is involved in neuronal modeling and mapping. Her book Living In The Light: Freeing Your Child From The Dark Ages is being published by American Atheist Press and will appear early in the spring of 2000. The book deals with the rearing of Atheist children. In an old episode of the new cartoon spoof, South Park, one of the children bemoans how hard it is to "be a Jew at Christmas." How much harder for a child to be an Atheist. Dad, Mom: not only do you have to fight the insanity of religion in the schools over Creationist dogma, not only do you have to protest the "Pledge of Allegiance" or explain the "In God We Trust" on the money, you have to encourage a child to miss out on the party. Or do you? Religions fight dirty, in my opinion. They try to get a body down and then shove that afterlife crap into you as though they were vengeful lepers. So I fight back with fire. I don't ban Santa, I one-up Santa. But I am Irish, and the only way around a tall tale is a taller tale. Now, I don't advocate creating more mysticism for a child to get even more confused, just a better party. Christmas, Chanukah, Saturnalia and All Those Lights Winter Solstice north of the Tropic of Cancer has always been a down time. Almost every Northern religion has a festival of lights around this time. Because Christians inherited the Roman Empire, Winter Solstice is a big deal, a BIG deal. And it has become a big DEAL. Most schools cave into the pressures of marking social events, and Christmas is one of the biggest –with a vacation, a pageant, and even gift exchange in school. Is your child going to sit in the corner happily and explain to everyone that he or she is an Atheist? Right. And what planet are you on, Mom? My own son hated Santa Claus with such a passion that I didn't have to do much about playing down Christmas. But he also isn't too much into gifts and insisted at the age of five that he had too much stuff and didn't want a Solstice gift. Most children aren't this cooperative. The essence of Winter Solstice is astronomical. In a family where partying is more appreciated, try having a "Lights of Knowing" party revolving around astronomy. Hang as many lights as you want, stay up all night, exchange gifts with a certain purpose, and create some stories. For the small child, start with the stars. There is a wealth of stories about the constellations and a taxonomy of stars that is fascinating to a small child. Let the story of Cassandra or Draco or Orion compete with Santa. Hang or paint constellations in glow-in-the-dark paint in your child's room. Name the lights with the names of the different stars, each one with a story. Create a yearly celebration of reciting the history of astronomy, from the days when men first looked up at the stars to the excitement of Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, and Galileo. Set up a custom of "Enlightenment" gifts, where at least one gift in the lot is a gift to expand a child's horizons. Older children can benefit from a yearly expedition to the planetarium or a telescope party. Have them invite their friends to stay up late, hear star stories, and look through a telescope at the moon or the planets. Let these children set goals every year about how they will push back the darkness of ignorance each year and give them a gift to help them do it. Make a party with drinks, presents, star-gazing, and lighting candles for each new thing the child has learned during the year. Have prizes and competitions for intellectual accomplishments of memory or discovery in the form of performances for relatives. Teens want to do things that are daring and outside of parental guidance. A great way to celebrate along the same lines is to let the teen invite friends over for a Science Fiction Marathon where they can stay up all night to lights and watch "Star Trek" or "Twilight Zone." Make the party a little daring so that your teen can win popularity by inviting fellows over. Also celebrate with gift giving for pushing back ignorance. Make a sport of learning facts such as a "Trivial Pursuit" marathon.
Halloween, Rosh Hashanah, Ramadan and All That Harvest
Halloween is a Celtic New Year celebration. The Celts began their day and their year with the setting sun. The Catholic Church, rather than ban this festival, tried to make it Holy with the celebration of the Day of the Dead or All Saint's Day, but were never able to eradicate all the skeletons and spirits and goblins of the Celts. The Celts were ancestor worshipers with a thirteen-month lunar calendar which made one day left over. This extra day was the day when the spirits of the ancestors were lost in the crack between the years and could come back to life. The Catholics tried to make a ceremony of demons getting loose and being put back to bed on All Saint's Day. For most children, Halloween is costumes and candy. If you find this superstitious party offensive, turn it into a "Superstitions Burn" party. For young children, this means letting them dress up as goblin, fairies, or other superstitious characters and then make a ritual of burning the costume and exploring the myths behind the image. Be careful, though, some kids get very attached to that alternate identity. It might be enough to put the costume away and start talking about the next superstition to be explored for next year. You can also turn this into an exploration of "what if I was" and encourage your child through the year to explore different professions. For older kids, try to do bonfires and fireworks and a demon-dance party. This will outweigh any school parties or other Halloween parties and get the Christians who find Halloween offensive. I think it is important to celebrate the badness of being human, in that humans are tricksters. Let your children let off a little steam in playing at "being bad." Fire is great for this. So are costumes. So are practical jokes. Have a contest where the kids have to compete to try to trick or scare the others. This builds skepticism and a child's suspicion about being led down the path of gullibility. Teens enjoy being wild. Let them through a party with a fire and have them give competitions where each person must dress like a superstition and give the accurate history of the superstition. This can lead to an exploration of the dark sides of religions and a sneering at the way that people use to think. It is both an act and a release. Halloween is usually so wild and anti-Christian that most people don't fear the religious aspects of it. If your family is Jewish or Muslim, September or October are far more serious celebrations involving fasting and the harvest and could do with a little competition. Try letting the kids fast, but throw in an extra sense of it being historical and a way of acknowledging that once, most people were farmers.
Valentines, Mardi Gras, and Breaking the Back of Winter It is important to have a festival when winter has kept everyone cooped up too long. St. Valentine's Day has made it into the schools as a kind of romance day. Mardi Gras is still a Catholic festival, visible usually in New Orleans and in other countries where the Protestant/Puritan ethic is not as strong. To further compete with religions and to throw off the massive importance of Christmas, I suggest a "Festival of Fools" sometime in February when life is dragging through winter and everyone gets irritable and impatient for spring. Start young children with a foolish day for telling the tallest tale. This gets the children interested in the veracity of stories and goes a long way to helping with gullibility and lying. Kids love to exaggerate. Start them exaggerating and it soon becomes evident when stories are stories and lying is lying. There is a rush to believe the stories of children these days which has led to the abuse of the story. Most small children tell tales, and religionists claim some stories to be true and others to be lies. So getting children interested in the tall tale makes them a little more skeptical of the stories like "the world was created in seven days" or "he rose from the dead" – in a way that is not so much defaming the content as being sensitized to the structure of the tale. Older children love riddles, jokes, magic, and competition. Throwing a "can you top this?" party with riddles and magic shows and performances of stunts and weird abilities such as eye rolling can go a long way to helping everyone with the winter blues. Remember, most of a party is in the repetition and the preparation. Having this party once is fun, but every year turns it into a celebration to mark time and help a child fill the gap that religion seeks to fill with annual celebrations. Teens can go wild with staging comedies, acrobatic events, inside athletic competitions, or magic fests. Have them invite friends over for a charade party or to fight the winter blues with a long preparation every year of a play or slapstick comedy or a wresting event. Gymnastics events take place then, as well as other inside sports which can easily be turned into part of an annual celebration. Teens also love marathons. Having a joke or riddle competition marathon will occupy many a mind that will wander off into trouble during the long stretch between winter break and spring.
Easter, Purim, and Other Returns from the Dead
Spring Equinox is a time when some calendars begin and end, just as the end of December and the end of October. More northerly cultures celebrated the beginning of spring with Beltaine or May Day, but Spring is heralded in American culture with Easter. I advocate taking the "resurrection" message of Easter and the solemnity of Passover and making a celebration to mark resurrection, new beginnings, and thankfulness for health and growth. For small children, the Easter Bunny can go hand in hand with the start of a garden and a celebration to mark getting bigger. Getting bigger is usually noted on birthdays, but a celebration in the spring is appropriate. A wall chart to show physical growth and a calendar to show accomplishments are good ways to help a child come to grips with being too little and too young. Even by the young age of five years, my son delighted in seeing old videos of himself and hearing stories about what he did when he was small. This is a good time to get out the photos and show a child how much time has passed. For older children, encourage costumes of "being" or making paintings of how they see themselves. Perhaps they see themselves in a role, or maybe they are more esoteric and see themselves yellow or as rainbows or stories. For an older child, start a new diary each year, or a calendar to which they can contribute. Each spring get out the old diaries and let the child read though the past years. Watch videos. Make a "time capsule" with a video and stuff that the child has outgrown during the year. Make a celebration of sealing and hiding the box with designs to open it in a year, two, or maybe even ten years. Encourage children to place in the capsule things that marked the year. They can cut out newspaper articles during the year and put them into a journal. "The year of the big fire." "The year that Spot died." Make an effort to create a personal history and a family history. One of the things most noted by Jews during the Passover celebration is the sense of history. For teens, turn Easter into a means of transformation. Let them change their personas at this celebration, get a piercing, or a haircut, change their wardrobe, etc. Encourage them to box or set aside something of the old persona for the time capsule. Stress the importance of journal writing for teens. It can, literally, save their lives and save thousands of dollars in therapy. Teens sometimes want to do damage to their old life to try to make a separation between childhood and adulthood. Let them do this. Let them destroy all their old stuff except some token to mark the past. Some teens need serious initiation rituals and will be drawn to dangerous rites of passage. This is an opportunity to establish a transformation ceremony so that when your child is a teen, the ceremony will be in place and can be "ramped up" to meet the needs of the teen who wants to "kill" an old life and take on a new life. Remember, initiation rituals cannot be performed by parents. Initiation has to be done by other adults and the role of the parents is to try to hold onto the child. If your teens need to "kill" their childhood, get your friends or uncles and aunts (usually of the same sex) to help with an initiation ritual in which the parent (usually of the same sex) protests the loss of the child and the child is "murdered" and taken away by the outside world. The others bring back the teen who is now an adult and is not referred to in any way that is connected with the child. A name change is appropriate, so are different rules, some kind of separation of lifestyles (separate meals). This ritual of initiation can do wonders to help a child transform into an adult and help the adult come to terms with the separation loss that is so common in American culture. Other holidays are easily ignored or are largely political in nature and not religious. Rather than taking holidays and celebrations from your children, raise them in the light of holidays to celebrate the Enlightenment of Humanity. |
