Feb. 14, 2008 at 10:14am

hearts and fluffy bunnies

(but not for me!)

The Man steadfastly asserts that Valentines Day is a non-holiday.  Of course, yesterday when our kid was deprived of her first class party due to the religious beliefs of one kid, that same Man was outraged, how could such an important day in a kid's life go unnoticed? Especially when the rest of the school was running around wearing pink paper hearts and sucking on candy?  Well, the kids in her class did a potlatch, I replied, to which he uttered a couple of duck-rhyming expletives and said something needed to be done about church boy.

Okay, I'm irritated about that situ, too, in point of fact.  I pretty much figured the Halloween Party would be a "Harvest Party" and I pretty much figured that Christmas would be neutered down to "Holidays."  But, wait.  Because of this kid,  the classroom had to be sanitized of *all* holidays, no stories about Christmas trees or animals being kind to each other in a show of seasonal love.

When I went in and read "The Mitten" to the class, a Ukrainian folk tale about a bunch of animals who all pile into a mitten on a snowy day, said kid raised his hand and told us all that in the Kingdom after the world ends lions and lambs would play together.  I sorta' smiled and nodded and went, mmmm, the same way I would have if some kid told me a transformer's name and its special skills, and asked a question of another kid, more story-related.

Then, I was midly amused.  Now, I feel like this whole situation is kind of ridiculous.  He can take up my time (and my kid's) telling me about his Kingdom, but he can't spend 15 minutes getting heart cookies and random scraps of paper saying "I choo choo choose you"?  To add insult to injury, the kid is coming home with all kinds of questions about church-- why don't we go? What do people do in church?  When can we go to church?  It's put us, as a family, in an odd and uncomfortable spot, but one I suspect we'd have to be in eventually.

If you couldn't tell, we're not very churchy people.  The Man has never, ever been churched, as his mom is a pretty clear athiest.  My own religious past had me taste-testing religions rather like one would ice cream at Baskin & Robbins. We did a bit of Catholicism, a bit of Lutheranism, a very brief stint in the Mormon church, quite a long foray into Southern Baptism, and then a couple of side forays into Unity and the random mega-church-ism of People's Church and Life Center.

The thing that I noticed universally was a sense of... disconnect, between who most of the people were on Sunday, and the rest of the week.  I noticed that there was a weird little sense of "we're going to Heaven, and we're the only ones going to Heaven."

But in the meantime, I always felt like there seemed to be a huge world division rather than unification that was more the message of many of the great, Godly men. That divisiveness, and wars, and badmouthing of others was all bad, and Good was supposed to be... not bad.

For me, I have decided, I like Good.  I like to think, that if I most of the time do the Right thing, then my world will be a better place, it's just a sort of logical upward spiral thing.  Smile at a person, they're more likely to smile back.  Frown at 'em, and they certainly won't feel warm and fuzzy about you.

So I guess, it's kinda' coming full-circle to the beginning of this post. In order to *not* offend one kid (who probably didn't have alot of choice in the matter, vis a vis his religious belief) a whole bunch of kids missed out on "I like you" messages.  Some rebellious wonderful ones brought in Valentines anyway (damn, I didn't, thinking they'd go into the trash or something) and the Kid was excited about that.  The other kids in the classroom were mystified, quite a few other parents, upset.

So to make up for yesterday, the kid and I will bake cookies, make a special dinner, and create an extra-special, super-duper,  be-all/end-all Valentine for daddy, who was kinda' saved to the spirit of a holiday.

Ironic, that the attempt to quell a thing can sometimes make it grow into something special, and bigger than it had been before.

I call that, "Good."