A long unused Kindle Fire lay gathering dust on an end table in our living room. Across the room, a gaming system sat similarly idle – its once enthusiasm-fueled glow lost to homework, youth sports, piano lessons and other fixtures of our family’s weekly grind.
Only six months ago, both were the heavy-hitters of another “successful” Christmas. Now, they’re faded monuments of consumerism, short-term happiness and a desire to keep up with a social expectation of providing children with an adequate haul of new material during the holidays.
Other examples abound, but I can scarcely remember many of them. I just know the money is gone, and there’s little more to show for it than a virtual bone yard of no longer played with belongings.
Thinking on this earlier in the week, I asked my wife, “Why do we do it?”
Neither of us came up with a good answer, but we began to workshop something that might be a good alternative.
Articles on psychological research that I’ve found (that my wife may or may not have told me about because she may or may not be way smarter than me) dating back to 2003 speak volumes on the value of experiences over possessions. One “Atlantic” article from 2014 I pulled up through a quick Google search examines a Cornell doctoral student’s findings that experiences trump material because people are less likely to measure their value by comparing them to other people’s experiences. If you’ve ever been around relatives, friends or neighbors on Christmas Day, you know well the same is not true for possessions.
The researcher also pointed out that anticipation makes people happy – especially if they are excited about an upcoming experience.
That point actually brought back one of my fondest memories growing up. For Christmas, when I was 15, my “big gift” was tickets to a weekend series in St. Louis to watch the Cardinals play the Atlanta Braves the following July. My cousin had invited me because I’d never seen a Major League Baseball game in person.
When that long-awaited weekend finally came, I watched Mark McGwire slug the 55th homerun of his record-breaking 70 that year, I got Ozzie Guillen’s autograph, I had my first-ever meal in a super-fancy restaurant, and having been exposed for the first time during the trip to this wonderful concoction, drank my weight in Mr. Pibb.
What I remember most, however, is looking forward to going, staring almost daily at the tickets I kept in a box on my dresser for half a year and wondering what it would be like to be there. No toy or video game can do that.
So, as Amelia and I talked the other night, we tallied the money we normally spend on the children and each other for Christmas, and it became easy to see how we could cobble together an annual three- to four-day jaunt, at least, to a place we’ve never been and still fill their stockings with a want, a need and something to read.
If we plan the trip for spring break or summer, the girls will even have some time to be excited about it. And maybe in 20 years when they think about their childhood, they’ll think about how funny it was when Daddy got lost driving somewhere and refused to ask for directions, or maybe singing in the back seat on the way to wherever, or how cool it was to stay up on Christmas Eve night and speculate where we were going to travel this time.
We haven’t decided, for sure, whether to do this (so don’t get too excited yet, kids). But the idea is definitely on the table.
Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.
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