Christmas Trees and Eudaimonia

I was completely unprepared for the task of being a father when I became one close to my twenty-sixth birthday. However, having fatherhood thrust upon me, as opposed to obsessively planning it for years, has had many benefits. One of them was that I did not go into it with all the preprogrammed and sappy notions about what it means to be a parent that many people have when they become parents. For example, this led me to not buy all the ridiculously expensive and totally useless contraptions that baby stores sell to new parents. I have been to houses where they buy every single one of those gadgets and honestly it is pathetic to look at the ridiculous display of overcompensation, ignorance, and conspicuous consumption. (No, I don’t mean your house.) I think this is the same attitude that leads to the whole “must be the parent of an exceptional child” mindset. Everything has to be the best-est-est and greatest for the baby leads to the child has to be the best-est-est-est him or herself. It all becomes a tyranny that threatens to take away any real chance of developing a relationship with your offspring since they cease being individuals and become objects to be manipulated in your life.

This is not my problem. I have been very careful not to pin my life dreams on my children and I know that having the most gadgets and making the kid go to the most Kindermusik classes only means that you spent the most money. However, my blasé attitude, like every plus, has its minuses and any position can be taken to an unhealthy extreme. My effort to not become a brainless dolt who professes total platitudes about the joys of being a father has kept me from expressing some of the real joy that comes from it. The truth is that I love my kids, but/and they drive me crazy. It is not easy to deal with two incredibly strong-willed people on a 24-7 basis, and it is even harder to do so when their well-being rests squarely on your shoulders. This has been particularly difficult for me because I have a very strong anti-authoritarian streak and yet now I am the authority. Talk about cognitive dissonance.

Part of the reason I don’t go crazy pushing some kind of exceptionalism on my kids is that I simply do not think that is what makes one a good parent. Unlike many who think that if their kid becomes a rich investment banker, a famous actor, a superstar baseball player, a lawyer, a doctor, etc... it means they succeeded in their job as parents I don’t. Those things are great, really they are. And I would be lying if I said I wouldn’t be proud and happy if my kids are very successful people. But I have always thought that the real metric for measuring how well I am doing at being a parent is how happy they are in a deep Aristotelian kind of way. This kind of happiness can only be reached by those who are exceptional at being ethical people. That is what I care about, namely that my kids be excellent or virtuous. I think that the true measure of being a good parent is whether your kids develop into good, excellent, virtuous human beings. By the way none of these qualities are meant in any way to be the absurd moralistic and hollow precepts that organized religion foists upon people.

Being a virtuous person is not about rote adherence to the rules that religio-political “leaders” throw at you. Those rules exist to control you, not to help you lead a happy and good life. Being good is not that simple. The demands of ethics are constant and cannot be memorized and performed mindlessly. To be virtuous means to be present, mindful and aware of the implications of your actions. For that, dogma simply will not do. This is what I take brother Socrates meant when he said that the unexamined life is not worth living. It is also what Bill and Ted meant when they advised people to be excellent to one another.

Why am I talking about all of this? It will serve me well to explain why on a recent trip to Costco my son did something that has had me beaming with pride ever since (and also lets me toot my own horn). My son is not exactly the easiest person in the world to deal with. He is extremely sensitive, temperamental, and stubborn as hell. These traits when unchecked get him into all sorts of trouble. At those times it is easy to feel that I am failing him as father, which is not a great feeling.

Last Christmas, because of financial difficulties that have not altogether subsided, my wife and I decided not to get a Christmas tree. This is a decision we have both regretted ever since because our son really wanted one and was deeply hurt about not having one. He has thus been talking about getting a Christmas tree for an entire year, and even though our finances are even worse now than last year we decided that this year we would make the sacrifices necessary and get a tree.

So on a recent trip to Costco my son was very aware that we would be looking at Christmas trees to buy and so he was scoping every plant he saw as a potential Christmas tree. Then he saw a strange looking tree that had been cut so that it had two spherical areas made out of branches. It sorta looks like a stick with two balls stuck in it. He was smitten; that was the Christmas tree he wanted. In my grownup uptightness I had to explain to him that the tree he liked was not a real Christmas tree. So he let go of that tree and began to look around for real Christmas trees. He was asking me all sorts of questions about them. Interspersed among the barrage of questions about trees he would make some statements about the tree we were getting. One of which was that he wanted to keep the tree in the house after Christmas. Sensing the potential minefield I began to explain:

– Christmas trees are only kept during Christmas.

– Why?

– The trees die because they have to be cut down to take them home.

– But what if we put it back in the ground when Christmas is done?

– No. That wont work because Christmas trees can’t grow in Puerto Rico. It's too warm.

And the trees that get cut don’t have roots anymore.

– Oh...

He paused for a second stared me right in the eye and asked:

– So we kill the Christmas trees?

Not sure of what to say I went with honesty is the best policy.

– Yes.

– Papa, that is messed up. I don’t want to kill a Christmas tree. Let’s get a tree that we can keep and use it as our Christmas tree forever.

And that is how we ended up with this tree:

as our Christmas tree, forever. It is also how I realized that I’m not doing such a shitty job as a dad. Maybe.