What did you get for Christmas

Remember when you were a kid, how on Christmas afternoon (or maybe the next day or maybe when you got home from your Grandparents’ house) you’d head over to see your friends and bring along your most impressive Christmas presents, just to show off a little? Remember the feeling of competition, of comparison, of seeing who had come out best?

I certainly do. My family never had much money, and we tended to emphasize the religious rather than the commercial aspects of Christmas in any case. We would usually get something fun from my mother’s parents, and on one memorable occasion a-very-briefly-rich uncle bought us all extravagant gifts, but generally speaking we didn’t have much to show off. My parents got us clothes and books and board games, which we liked but weren’t going to impress our friends much. My father’s parents didn’t even do as well as that, giving us the most ridiculous presents year after year (Matching stone book ends for everyone – from toddler through teen? Absolutely! I’m sure they’ll love it.)

My point is, that I remember hanging out with other kids after Christmas as they showed off their Nintendo system or GT Snowracer or Star wars Millennium Falcon playset, while I had nothing to show in return except a hockey stick (my mother’s parents), a pair of jeans (my parents), and a set of crocheted snowflake Christmas tree ornaments (my father’s parents, of course). I also remember the one Christmas when my soon-not-to-be-so-rich uncle bought me one of those crazy new snowboard things and I got to be king of the tobogganing hill for a season.

Now, if we were feeling that kind of Christmas competition just from the kids who lived in our neighbourhood, I want you to imagine the kind of anxiety that kids must feel today when the expectation is that they’ll show their Christmas gifts to the whole world through whichever social media feeds they and their friends like best. My kids don’t even have their own phones, but the moment their friends were over, the house turned into a photo shoot. One kid was posing with the splash screen of the new video game he got. The other was flashing made up gang signs as he shows off his new shoes for the camera.

Then they started skimming through their friends’ feeds to check out (and critique) the stuff that everyone else got. It was depressing. The only emotions on show were jealousy or superiority, depending on how much they liked what they were seeing – “Whoah! Check out that phone!” or “Get wrecked! Those shoes are nasty!” I eventually just had them put the phones away, but I knew they’d be out again as soon as they headed off home, and I also knew that all their other friends were probably doing exactly the same thing.

It isn’t that they’re doing anything so new. They’re doing exactly what we did on the playground when we were kids. What’s different is that they’re doing it in front of the whole world. They’re playing out that same game in front of anyone who cares to look. The stakes are higher. And they know it. One of those friends who came over yesterday let my kid take his picture as he jokingly held up the colouring books my youngest had got from his aunt. “Don’t post it,” he said, half playing, half pleading. “It’ll destroy my social life.” Those are the kinds of anxieties at stake for kids now. One picture with a gift that their friends don’t approve might be a social disaster.

The problem is that they see this behaviour being modelled by the adults in their lives. If you don’t believe me, check and see how much of your social media feeds at this time of year are filled with pictures of people’s artfully decorated trees or deliciously arranged cookie platters or carefully staged families. The sense of Christmas (and life generally) as a competition is now everywhere that our social media reaches, and our kids see that. They internalize that.

There’s no way to eliminate this entirely, of course. It’s now too firmly embedded in our culture, and its always been too firmly embedded in human nature. We can, however, model alternatives for our kids. We can make sure that we do the things that are important to us as families and as communities, not just the things that will look good as pictures on our feeds. We can make sure that we don’t make judgements about people based simply on the things we see of them online. We can make sure that we value the people around us more than the numbers of followers or likes we have.

Our kids need to know that their value comes from more than what the internet says about them, and they’re not likely to discover that anywhere but from us.

Luke Hill has been the parent of birth kids, adoptive kids, foster kids, and just-need-a-place-to-stay kids for fourteen years. He’s had experience with kids in homeschool, public schools, and alternative schools. He’s been a teacher, a camp counsellor, and a coach. He’s also taught parenting courses for Children’s Aid for almost a decade. When he isn’t working with kids, he’s a writer, a publisher, and the director of a non-profit organization that supports book culture.