DECEMBER 11, 1998 GAY PEOPLE's ChroniICLE

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GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

Holiday Gift Guide

The season of gratitude

A time to stop and smell the brownies, and be glad there's a kitchen to cook them in

by Beren deMotier

I had hoped that this would be the year our kids realized there was a spiritual meaning to Christmas beyond Linus' moving annual speech. And I mean spiritual, not just religious. We've already given them the Christ child, manger, Wise Men, little drummer boy basics.

For that matter, it's never been a completely materialistic decoratingand-procurement event around here, ripe with tension and about as empty of value as a bowl of Lucky Charms. But we were hoping to go farther, and make that leap into the church-going set, replete with lesbian mothers affirming their values among the liberal doctrines.

But we have somehow never made it out of the house on a Sunday morn. While I have very grave misgivings about "the church"--read:

us through the holidays with our souls intact and our family connected. We have reinvented the Sabbath for ourselves. This idea has been on our back burner for a long time, to take one day a week, and let it have no errands, no chores, and no responsibilities to get in the way of being together.

We've had many a conversation about the lost virtues of “blue laws," though goodness knows I don't even fully know what they are and probably wouldn't like them if I did. All I know is if businesses were closed on Sunday, or any day, at least there'd be one day a week when you couldn't scurry around like ants, avoiding close human interaction.

A 'Home for the Holidays' slogan doesn't mean a hill of beans if you've been asked not to come home, especially if you insist on

There'd be no open video stores. No recreational shopping. No hopping down to the A & P to put off that little discussion with Junior about his dope smoking problem. But contrary to our

"Christianity" and its wholesale condembringing that lover of yours. children's perceptions, we are not the rulers of

nation of women, gays, midwives, and any-

one who stood in its way of making money and gaining power, power, POWER (implied diabolical laugh), there is that old babyand-the-bath-water thing to think about. What part of the mix to keep, what part to discard, and where do we as a family fit in? Despite the assurances of our friends who teach Sunday school at the church in question that it is not a brain-washing enterprise unseen since the days of Manson and Frommein fact you don't even have to believe in God-we still haven't done it. We have, however, found a compromise that works pretty well for the moment, and may even see

the universe, so we're in this on our own.

Of course, our version is exactly that "our" version, and not everyone's Sabbath would include an hour and a half of Batman and Superman cartoons. But it's about more than just a few cartoons. It's about all those things you say you're going to do with your kids, or each other. The games you'll play, the puzzles you'll do, the books you'll read. We can't get out of paying attention to each other, like it or not.

And since this month we'll be having our Sabbath in the light of a well-endowed, if eclectic, tree and surrounded by

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