After Christmas. What the ceremony was actually for.

What Christmas — or Hanukkah, or Eid, or Diwali, or any of the winter celebrations that mark the darkness with light — actually does for children is not primarily about the gifts. The gifts are a symbol of something the ceremony is doing at a different level.

What the ceremony does is this: it marks the year as having a shape. There was a before-Christmas, and there is a during-Christmas, and there will be an after-Christmas. The child who has experienced several Christmases knows this sequence — knows that the anticipation ends, that the day arrives, that the day passes, that ordinary life returns. This knowledge — the knowledge that significant things have beginnings and middles and ends, that the intensity is temporary — is one of the most important things the calendar teaches.

Children who have predictable annual ceremonies develop a different relationship with time than children who don't. The ceremony is a scaffold for the understanding of time. It says: here is a marker. Here is a shape. Here is something you can count toward and count from.

Here is a marker. Here is a shape. Here is something you can count toward and count from. That is what ceremony gives a child. Not the content. The shape.

Here is a marker. Here is a shape. Here is something you can count toward and count from. That is what ceremony gives a child. Not the content. The shape.

That is what ceremony gives a child. Not the content. The shape.