Somehow, this feels like the most controversial post I have made in a long time. If you want to get offended about what I teach my own kids, you should probably know I am not going to care. I’m just sharing about my own life today. A choice I made in teaching my kids. This is the beauty of homeschooling, we each get to do it in a totally unique way.

Tradition

I love reading my kids books that go with the seasons and holidays. Every year in December I have read my kids the book The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Barbara Robinson. It is a short chapter book, written in the 1970s. It is narrated by a child of a “regular” American family of the time. Every year our narrator is forced to be in the church Christmas pageant, which is a boring and meaningless experience. However, that changes the specific year this story is set. Everything is different that year.

Now, why would I, a person who runs a secular blog and talk about secular education read this book with religion right at the front, to my kids? First, we read it because I wanted to share a funny book that I enjoyed as a child. Growing up in the 1980’s, in a small town, I could identify with some of the story. I liked the heart warming moments at the end. I related to having to be in a Christmas pageant even if you didn’t really want to. My kids have not had many of those experiences, so I wanted to share them.

Questions

The thing is, every year, my kids had different questions about the characters, the story, the plot. The lessons this book taught them went far beyond the funny Christmas book it started out as.

The first year I read them the book, my kids my kids were small. They had questions like “What is a Christmas pageant?” “What were the Wise men?” “Why is a bathrobe a costume?” It was cute. They laughed at the antics in the book, even if they didn’t quite understand.

In the story, the Herdmans are the “bad kids” at school. They have no father. Their mother is barely involved with them and instead works double shifts. They are bullies and unsupervised terrors. These are the children who join the Christmas pageant for this year. And in a twist of fate, the narrator’s mother becomes the pageant director. They take all the major roles but don’t know the basic story of Jesus’s birth. It changes the entire experience. By the end the author feels she understands the true meaning of Christmas.

As my children got older, they asked deeper questions. “Do churches actually just have random volunteers doing everything?” “Why wasn’t CPS called?” “Why didn’t ANYONE help the Herdmans more?”And that is a very deep question for kids to ask. So, we discussed ideas for how we could help a family like the Herdmans today. We also had a lot of talks about how churches work, and the Christian religion.

Why this is educational

I’m not raising my kids in a Christian church, but I am not raising them ignorant of religion. We celebrate Christmas in a secular way at our house. I want them to know Bible stories because they are important literary and cultural touch points. If they want to explore attending church, or any other religion, that is always up to them.

Reading them this specific book let us learn about topics of small town life in America before they were born. We learned about religion and the story of Christmas. They also learned that often the kids we call “bad” are the ones with a difficult life, and that the world needs more compassion.