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A Conscious Christmas 

With Advent commencing on Sunday November 29, now
is a good time to reflect on what type of family festival you
would like to create. Our Kindergarten Teacher, Vanessa Fountain, offers her experiences and thoughts on consciously creating family celebrations.

I don’t know if it is just length of life and lessons learnt or the fact that our children are now young adults and have come to their own opinions about the way we as a culture celebrate Christmas but last year we did our Christmas very differently. That doesn’t make it “right” or “the way” but I’d like to offer it, if for no other reason than to elicit a reaction that brings your own soul’s longing closer to your awareness.
The Lila of life can be warm, magical, wondrous, exciting and exhilarating. It can also be challenging, heartbreaking, stressful, cold and lonely. 

For many the festivals that we hope will punctuate our lives with joy and meaning, only serve to reinforce the areas in our lives where we perceive that we don’t measure up, fit in or have apparently failed.  That which should be joy filled, triggers anxiety attacks, depression and feelings of dread.

I would like to give you an imagination or a picture of an aspect of the Christmas festival from an Anthroposophical point of view. We do not teach Anthroposophy in Waldorf schools. Anthroposophy is for adults to explore or not, out of their own free will. 
The Christmas Festival from an Anthroposophical point of view is a very ancient festival. It was celebrated in the earliest Mysteries of most religions as a festival of the sun. Not, however as a festival of the outer sun but of the inner transformation represented by the sun. 
The mystery schools teach us in pictures and stories. One of the oldest pictures is of the sun, the moon and the earth being one body. The sun shone within this body and no light fell on its outer surface, it was in and of itself, light. In this picture, when the sun and moon separated from the earth, no longer was there light within but the light shone on the surface of the earth. If we understand this picture as representing the spiritual aspect of man, coming from the spirit world where the light was the spiritual being, to separating from the light, (coming into earthly being and then to the journey of reawakening, recreating out of free will, to raise up and transform the light) then we can also see this as a picture of the journey of spiritual connection and spiritual disconnection. This then required a mediator between the spiritual and the temporal (the church). Man then continued on the journey of self-awakening through free will and on to the development of consciousness. 
This picture lives within the mythology of most cultures and the imagery has been taken and envisioned to suit the consciousness of different times.

 Ancient cultures with their dependence and connection to the land and the seasons were acutely aware of the journey of the sun in relationship to their position on the earth.

 Now in these mystery schools there were the initiates who understood these pictures on a deep level and then there were those who through their connection to nature just felt the significance but were not cognisant of its implications. And so it was that when the sun was at its furthest point, and its strength was felt at its weakest – it was then that the initiate sought to rediscover the sun within/ to overcome the spiritual death and raise the human being and the earth to a transformed spiritual state. For the land worker it was the promise of the return of the sun at the deepest and bleakest point of winter. 

It was the promise of spring, of the overcoming of death (winter) and of new birth and new growth.

This light was given many names throughout the ages, but for Christianity from an Anthroposophical point of view it was called the Christos. This is a very simplified explanation of a picture that lives at the heart of Anthroposophy and I encourage you to explore it further if it interests you. 
So holding the picture of spiritual transformation and at the same time considering how my family and I could hold Christmas more consciously, we asked ourselves;

What does Christmas means to us as individuals? 
What does Christmas means to us as a family?
What traditions do we want to continue and why?
What does not serve us as a family? 
What does not serve us as members of a global community?
What will bring us closer to our understanding of what the essence of the festival is?

We went through our own process, reconnected to our understanding of what the festival stood for and its essential message. We talked about what had worked for us at different ages and what hadn’t. We talked about future generations in the family and what we would like to pass forward. 

We looked at how our understanding could be expressed as an act of universal love to community, friends and loved ones that are not Christian and do not celebrate Christmas.

Last year, we chose not to have a Christmas tree, we stepped out of the Christmas gift arms race, we simplified everything. Instead, we spent time together – stress free. We celebrated the love, the striving, and the perfection in our human imperfection. We said no, and we said yes, to what would bring us closer together, to what would raise us all up in our striving to be the best version of ourselves that we can be. We said yes to compassion and understanding that sometimes life isn’t happening the way we had imagined it would, but that it was ok, it is a process and we are there to support each other through it. 

Life is a journey. Things happen, things change. Some things are expected and some not. Some things bring us great joy and some things bring us to our knees.

For my family we will continue to hold the question around how we celebrate Christmas but at the centre will always be how we hold each other. We will continue to learn, to fine tune and to find our light and the light in each other.

So how do we celebrate Christmas in the kindergarten in a Waldorf school? 

In most Waldorf kindergartens you will find a picture of Mother Mary. This is not there as a Christian icon but as a picture of the archetypal mother. And so it is when we tell stories, sing songs and learn of the preciousness of the Jesus child that we uphold the archetype of the preciousness of the spirit child within us all. 
The stories speak to the love of a mother and father for their child, to stories of wonder and awe at the world around us. The interconnection between us and nature and the support we have from and give to the spiritual world.

The four weeks leading up to Christmas are Advent. Advent is celebrated in the kindergarten by acknowledging different aspects of our world.

 In week one, we reconnect to the mineral world – “the world of stones, crystals, seashells and bones”. In week two, we acknowledge the plant kingdom – “plants that reach up to the sun and in the breezes dance”.
In week three, we turn to the beasts – “The light of hope that we may see in greatest and in least.” And the fourth light of Advent, “It is the light of Man, The light of love, the light of thought, to give and understand.”

For the children, Christmas in the kindergarten is carried by the normal rhythms and routines with the focus being upon the observation of their world and their place in it, through the mineral, plant, animal and human kingdoms. 

But how do we support our children at this time of year, when consumerism is at its worst, when the world and those that occupy it seem to go just a little crazy? 
This is the part that I call:

CHRISTMAS: THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY

The Good:
• The magic of the wonder and excitement of the young child on Christmas morning
• Of family coming together and behaving themselves
• Of gifts of love and consideration. (Homemade or consciously chosen well in advance)

The Bad:
• Stressed parents
• Expectations and perceived expectations to create a ‘wonderful Christmas’ 
• Work deadlines loom before the Christmas break 
• Big lead up, big clean up
• Overcommitted social calendars
• Worries about the financial cost of Christmas presents
• Getting all the Christmas shopping done in time

The Ugly:
• Mass of complex social interactions with family and relatives. Stressors: Lack of privacy, lack of control - a holiday that seems to have a form set in stone, regression into childhood behaviours around parents and siblings that we thought we were done with , anxiety, loneliness and disappointment
• Credit card debt
• For many Christmas is a time of depression, isolation and a reminder of all in their life that does not measure up to what society tells us our lives should look like.
• It falls at the end of the year, a natural time for taking stock of the year that has passed – yet another opportunity to not measure up.
• Stressful shopping expeditions
• There is the presents arms race. Where Christmas isn’t Christmas without there being many, many presents. We inadvertently teach our child that bigger is better; more is better and foster greed and consumerism. Many Anthroposophists only give one present from the parents to the child for birthdays and Christmas. One precious, well considered and treasured present.
• Parents and children being exposed to outrageous consumerism and the aisles of landfill.
• Social inequity screams at this time of year.
• We engage in the Father Christmas story – mostly unconsciously. Do we choose the pictures we give our children or just buy into a cultural norm? I’m not saying that telling our children that Father Christmas flies on a sleigh drawn by reindeer and drops down your chimney is wrong, I’m just asking, did you question it before you had your first Christmas with your child? I know we didn’t.
• Then there is the post-Christmas letdown.
• And New Year resolutions ready to be made and broken in quick succession. (I believe this is because they almost always come from a premise of lack or not being good enough as we are. Where is the compassion and understanding – gone, only seven days after Christmas? If we can’t be loving and compassionate and journey with ourselves what hope have to teach it to those in our care?)

Festivals punctuate our months, years and indeed lives. They give them meaning. They show how we have grown, how we have journeyed on the voyage to “knowing ourselves” and how that “knowing” is expressed in how we engage with others. But for festivals to be meaningful, we need to engage with them consciously.

I wish you a Christmas filled with love, connection, equanimity, compassion, peace, and a visioning of the world we would like our children to inherit. But that’s my heart’s desire, what’s yours? What is the gift of this festival that you want to give to yourself and your child?

Much love,
Vanessa Fountain
Rose Kindergarten Teacher

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