(soft music) - Welcome friends to this episode of the Everyday Educator podcast. I'm your host, Lisa Bailey, and I am excited to spend some time with you today as we encourage one another, learn together, and ponder the delights and challenges that make homeschooling the adventure of a lifetime. Whether you're just considering this homeschooling possibility or deep into the daily delight of family learning, I believe you'll enjoy thinking along with us.

But don't forget, although this online community is awesome, you'll find even closer support in a local CC community. So go to classicalconversations.com and find a community near you today. Well, listeners, Merry Christmas. We are almost halfway through the month of December, and I know that your family is enjoying some time of Christmas celebration.

Maybe your homeschool has taken a brief hiatus and you are enjoying some more family time and freedom together. I've got a suggestion for your family, for all of our families this Christmas. What if we intentionally spent time together doing the simplest things? What if we practice some simple habits designed to draw us to one another and to start meaningful conversations designed to provoke us to deeper thinking and to encourage us to true worship?

What if in this season of busy, we celebrated Christmas by praying together, playing together, reading together, exploring together and serving together. This Advent season, the everyday educator wants to practice these habits along with you. So we're gonna talk to others who wanna try this plan too. So you can listen in every Tuesday to ponder the next verb.

And today we're gonna be talking about read together. And I have a dear friend and fellow family reader, Tim Knotts with me today. Tim, thank you so much for coming on Everyday Educator. - I've been looking forward to it. Thanks, Lisa. - I love, Tim and I like to talk together.

So we're gonna try to keep this conversation in the middle of the road and stick to our topic, which is really all about helping us as families simplify our Advent, getting the most wonder and celebration out of the time that we spend together without getting caught up in the whirl of busyness and ought tos and shoulds and fear of missing out when we look at what everybody else is doing.

So, Tim, I wanna ask you first, what is it that you and your family love about Christmas? - We love lots of things. And I wish that I could say that I had all those answers to those great conundrums that you just posed, Lisa. - I know, right. - We're trying to figure it all out too, especially year by year as things change.

But we love, I mean, we love all sorts of things, the traditions, the flavors, the stories, the family time, even sort of the balance of busyness and then followed by a little bit of rest after the holiday. It's all good in its own way. - Yeah, that is really true and super encouraging because if we have families who are thinking, oh, well, I go overboard maybe.

Somebody might think I go overboard in the baking or overboard in the decorating and we like to be busy. Is there anything wrong with that? I think it's very wise reminder that you just gave us that it's okay to be busy and it's okay to rest and that perhaps the best way to celebrate is to find the balance there.

Let me ask you this. I know that you guys are New Englanders. So are you exuberant celebrators, quiet celebrators or somewhere in between? - I think we have a mix in our family. Some of our children start celebrating Christmas anytime after the 4th of July. (laughing) And they know that they kind of have to celebrate it a little under the radar.

And so there's some Christmas music listening that happens when adults aren't around. (laughing) I think we sort of swing into the season more around the Thanksgiving time like many families, some of us a little before and some of us a little after. But we definitely enjoy decorating and all the festivities and like to do it a little longer than just maybe the week of Christmas.

- Gotcha, gotcha. I know our family, we also have that mix. We have that one child who refuses to entertain the notion of Christmas music until it's December. And so you have to be very under the radar if you're in her presence. And then I had friends that just mystified me because they waited until Christmas Eve to put up their Christmas tree.

And December 26, by lunchtime, it was going back. Everything was taken down. And that was a mystery to me because my family loves Christmas and we pretty much take the whole month of December and celebrate. I'm sure that some people would feel that it was exuberant. I tell people I'm gonna keep doing it this way as long as it keeps making us happy and we can do it.

So what are some of your favorite family traditions and how did they start? And I especially want to know which traditions were intentionally started by you and Cynthia and which were unintentionally repeated every year. - Yeah, so we grew up with pretty different traditions between us in our birth families.

And it wasn't until probably our third child came along that we sat down and said, this sort of traveling back and forth and splitting time between grandparents every season, debating who's Thanksgiving it was and who's Christmas it was, kind of needed to stop. And we decided that at that point, we were going to have Christmas, at least as a rule, maybe not every single year, but as a general rule at our house.

And that any of our family members would be welcome to join us. But with three and then four children, we said, it's time to make our own family traditions. And so we did, and we didn't start with very many, but we did decide that, yeah, that the Christmas tree should go up sometime in that week or two after Thanksgiving.

And that we would have our Christmas present opening on Christmas morning, which is different than the way I grew up where we opened ours on Christmas Eve. - My family too, when I was growing up. Yeah, family presents for Christmas Eve. - And so there were some sort of concessions back and forth about what we would do and how we do it.

And then some other ones though, they sprung up over time. One Christmas, I saw a delicious sounding recipe for orange rolls. So they're made like cinnamon rolls, but they're done with orange instead of cinnamon. And I made them and from then on the kids insisted that that was part of our Christmas tradition.

- Right, anything they love and you do once becomes a, well, we always do that. - So I think a couple of years later, I mentioned maybe doing something different and they all protested that no, orange rolls have been part of our tradition from time immemorial, we must have these orange rolls.

So it is funny how some of them were choices and others were happenstance, but have become beloved parts of our family tradition anyway. - I love that, I love that. I think that kids love repetition and we see that in the way we teach our children classically, but I think they love traditions.

And I know there were things that my girls, if it happened once and they really liked it, that they act like, well, of course, we're always gonna do it that way. We still have the same Christmas night meal that we had happenstance one time when they were little because it was really cold and I had the makings of chicken and dumplings.

And so it has become, and of course we're having that on Christmas night, so. - Well, it sounds like a delicious tradition. - It's a very fun one and I do like them. Do your kids love all your traditions or are there some that they just tolerate, especially as they grow into teenagers?

- I think most of the traditions are ones that they're pretty okay with. I think we've tried to not impose too many that are onerous or too much of an investment so that they stay relatively fresh and content with those. I mean, there are some that some love more than others.

I think many of them protest that we take down our Christmas tree around New Year's and they would love to see it stay up until it becomes a certain fire hazard instead of only a fire hazard. So yeah, we definitely have some that are less popular, but for the most part, we try to keep the ones that are meaningful and not just ones that are traditions for tradition's sake.

- Yes, yes. And finding the meaning in each of those traditions can sometimes help a family member who's not as partial to a tradition if they just know why you love it so much. That sometimes will invest that tradition with a little more importance even for the one who didn't choose it.

Okay, I know we're gonna talk about how to simplify advent and with one of those scribblers verbs, read together. And I know that you guys are a big read aloud together family all the times, not just during the holidays. So what is it, Tim, that makes you and Cynthia so dedicated to reading aloud together?

- Oh, there are a lot of reasons. I think a few of the most important ones are sort of going from the most evident is that there's content in those books that's important that I want my children and my family to be aware of and to be reminded of.

So that's sort of dictates some of what we read. There's a cultural context that comes about too. Like as we read books from different times and eras that talk about different things. But a lot of them are because they're good opportunities for conversation when you run into a conflict or you run into a feeling in a book that you want to talk about because children need to learn sometimes how to talk about their feelings or how to talk about their experiences and to do it in the context of a book instead of in their quote unquote real life is a safer place to do that.

- Yep, yeah, it is a great way to develop a moral imagination and to deal with, as you said, subjects that maybe hopefully our children will never experience firsthand but that they need to know how to deal with or think about, contemplate, be prepared to address should it ever arise.

Yeah, that's really good. - The last reason that I'll share is that we think it's really important that they understand the importance of reading good books and that we show that to them by not just telling them about it or letting them see us do it but by doing it together with them.

- Yeah, it shows them that it's important enough for you guys to spend family time on. That's how important it is. Does reading together affect your family's mood? - It can. I don't think it's a panacea, right? It doesn't solve every problem. There are times when I just am totally invested and want to sit down and snuggle up and read with my kids and they're not feeling it.

And that can create some conflict sometimes where we have to sort out what's going on and why aren't they interested in this right now. And sometimes it's a good check on my heart 'cause I can get frustrated and feel like, hey, I've set aside this time out of my busy schedule, you can at least make some moments for me.

But overall, I would say once we do get to it, it is such a good resetting. It's a good opportunity for us to all be quiet and to be together, to laugh together sometimes or to wrestle a little bit with a passage or an idea. And sometimes they're excited to keep reading and sometimes they're ready to be done.

And I think gauging that mood as a parent is important. And it's a good practice for me, especially since I'm not the primary homeschooling parent, my wife is. And so for me to be engaged with my kids like that in at least a semi-academic setting helps me make sure that I keep a pulse on where they're at and where they're at.

It helps me make sure that I keep a pulse on where they are and that I'm being attentive to their needs. - Right, and you get to see how they're growing and their ability to consider big questions or how they're processing or what's interesting to them. That's a really good, good point, Tim.

It keeps families kind of on the same page, knowing each other. I know I'm very familiar with what you're describing that sometimes the kids are just not as interested in investing in that family read-aloud time as we are for whatever reason. I mean, who knows why sometimes. But I agree with you that it's a good reset time.

And it does draw our hearts together. It does give us shared memories and a shared investment in a story or a hymn or a passage of scripture, whatever we're reading, we've got a shared investment in the group thoughts that developed as we read. Yeah, I like that. - You're right on that there's that sort of unifying thing that happens as we're all thinking some of the same thoughts after an author.

And I love that idea of the fact that it doesn't have to be you're pulling out a novel or Russian history or something, that it can be a lovely little book of poems or a contemplation of scripture or hymns. - Yeah, yeah, I like that. I really like that.

Is it hard for y'all to make time to read together during the holidays? Do you ever feel like you're just too busy to sit down and do that? - Not just the holidays. (laughing) - All the time. - Yeah, I mean, it is. It's always a struggle to find that set aside time.

I tend to try to do it around a meal time in our family because we are together. It doesn't always work. Sometimes there's too much. Sometimes it's just bad timing. Sometimes they're not in a place to give it their attention and we have to find another time. But trying to find that regularity of this is a time when we do this sort of thing.

And like we talked about earlier, kids like to know what the pattern is. And so if they know that the pattern is, we spend some read aloud time, maybe not every day, but our typical read aloud time is around the meal when we're all at the table anyway. - Right, you just expect to stay a little longer.

- Yeah, yeah. - I know when our girls were really little, we had a read aloud time ranged around sleeping time. So like right before nap time and right before bedtime. And as they got older, there were no more nap times and everybody's bedtime was different. And so I know that we did some, we did some times where we would read on Sunday afternoons or Sunday evenings by default, kind of as a way to start head into the week together on the same page.

So I think you just have to find what works for your family. - Our church has been meeting in the afternoons because of some facility issues. And so Sunday mornings are a really nice time for us to have some family time. - Oh, that's a sweet time, yeah, yeah.

So how do you think, think with me a little bit about this 'cause I've been trying to think of ways to help families simplify their Advent routines, but deepen their joyful expression of the holiday. So how might reading together simplify the celebration of Advent while deepening our joy? - Yeah, I mean, it's an easy time of year to have your attentions and even your affections drawn in so many different directions.

Gift giving and shopping is a beautiful thing, but it can take over your life when you're spending all your hours, either at the store or cruising around the Amazon website. And the decorating of the house is also a good thing, but when it's, and now it's this window and now it's the Christmas tree and now it's the front yard and it can just all take over.

And while there's parts that give joy, there's also things that can eventually steal joy. So I think having that time and being intentional about what are your readings, what are you gonna be doing together can help define that center again as a family to help you at least daily or as often as you're able to do it to come together around the thing that's the center and not all the other stuff that's good, but not the middle.

Even those traditions we talked about earlier, they're good, but if you lose sight of Advent and Christmas because of all the family traditions, then they've sort of taken a bad place even if they're a good thing. - Yeah, yes, yes, that's exactly it, that's exactly it. So many of our traditions are fun and there's nothing wrong with them.

But if we get so frenzied in the production that we don't enjoy the activity or don't enjoy the company, the people that we're doing it with, we've lost some of the reason for doing it and it's not helping us to celebrate anymore. So what kinds of things do you guys read together?

And I mean, you can tell us generally, but also are there certain things that you read aloud every year together? - Mm-hmm, so I mean, I tend to read stories to my kids, whether they're in the form of a novel or short stories or children's books, that's where I focus a lot of my reading in the read aloud sense.

Cynthia reads them different things, so they get a variety from the two of us. But this time of year, we definitely try to pick out like a devotional guide that works our way through Advent ideas so that we don't, so we make sure that we're covering all the main ideas and that we're not focusing too much on one thing and leaving out other things that we should be talking about.

And so sometimes those sort of daily Advent guides can be a help, but it's also though important not to feel like they're the master and you're the servant and you have to, like, hey kids, we have to do this. Rain or something, whether we got the time or not, we're gonna grind it out.

So there is even in that finding that balance of sometimes we just touch on it and we don't read the whole thing for a day or we miss a day and we have to do a little catch up and being flexible with ourselves and with our family life this time of year is also important.

- I know that there are times when, 'cause we've done that too, Advent devotional things. And then there's some days that just don't, I mean, they kind of left my kids cold. They didn't really have anything to put into it. It didn't strike a specific chord with them. And then there were days when for some reason, they found deep application from that particular day's reading.

And so we spent tons more time than we did the day before. And I think we have to be prepared for that as parents that everything won't resonate with everybody every year. - Yeah. So there are things, apart from trying to pick a devotional guide, there are other things that we also bring back year after year.

I wouldn't say that all of them are in every year thing 'cause there are some years that some of them get a bit crowded out. But we try, I always read them, Charles Dickens, the Christmas Carol, either the full version, which is pretty lengthy for a seasonal read aloud.

And especially for littler kids. But he actually wrote his own abridged version for public readings. - Oh, you know what, I don't think I have that. - And so that's a great choice because it is just enough shorter that it's a little more manageable for younger kids or for a busier family to read.

I always read them, Oh Henry's Gift of the Magi. And we always read The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. Those are sort of our books that come around year after year. There's poetry and hymns. Of course, scripture, the scriptural stories are central to what we encounter. Often repetitively, right? And that's okay.

That they hear those verses, that they hear those stories more than one time in a season is actually a really good thing. - Yeah, I can remember. I can remember when I was growing up, and this will probably date me, the Charlie Brown Christmas Special was fairly new. I mean, it hadn't been around forever, like it has now.

And I loved it, it was my favorite one. And I can remember the year I suddenly discovered that I could recite that Luke 2 passage that Linus recites in the cartoon special. And so I can, to this day when I read it aloud, I can sort of hear Linus's sweet little voice reading it in my head.

But I think that anything that our children hear over and over when they're really young makes a great impression on them. And so, yeah, I agree with you. There are things that we want to read more than once a season, because we want it to take root in our children's hearts.

So if somebody asks you, I want you, Tim, to help me design a reading program for celebrating Christmas deeply yet simply, what would you suggest? You mentioned the things that you guys read every year, A Christmas Carol, why do you read that every year? - Well, Dickens, his writing there shapes so much of how we think about Christmas as Western Christians.

Since he wrote it, it's been so, so much has changed because of his writing in the way that we think about Christmas. So I think it's important historically. And again, it gives such a good avenue for some good conversation about past and present and future and what does it mean to be a good person, which is a good conversation to have, even though that itself is not gospel.

- Hopefully then opens the further door to the conversation about, is that good enough? Right, is being a good person good enough? - Yes. - Is Scrooge saved at the end or is he just improved? - Oh my goodness, yes. See, those are the kind of deep conversations that people don't always see coming when they read a story or a novel.

And maybe they don't think about the fact that that's a conversation you could have with your child that would make them stop and think. And you come to it, like you said earlier, Tim, through the experience of a character. So you're not finger-pointing at somebody they know, somebody in their family or in their neighborhood or in their church, but you're helping them to consider larger questions because they came up in the life of a character in a read-aloud.

- Right, or like I said, we read O. Henry's Gift of the Magi, and in that one, you have the chance to talk about the cost of a gift. And obviously, this time of year, our kids think about that as they decide how much of their little savings they want to spend on giving gifts.

And it's, again, a beautiful open door for talking about the gospel and what did it cost God to send Jesus. And that that's a free gift for us to receive, but it wasn't a free gift for him to give. - Yes, yes. And that's the kind of simple but deep celebrations I think a lot of us long to have as a family.

So if someone were to ask me where to start because not everybody's gonna dive in with Dickens or even a devotional guide because some of those are good and some of them are not so good and they take some investment to follow along with them, I would say start with the scriptures, start with the real source material.

You know, those first few chapters of Matthew and Luke and John are so full of wonderful things to talk about that that's a great place. I mean, even if you just read them a couple of times through your week and cement that as part, like you said, of hearing Linus in their head, but hopefully it's not Linus, hopefully it's their parents' voice that they hear reading those stories.

And with some older kids, I think it would be really fun to approach those and look at your little cross-reference notes in your Bible and then go have a scavenger hunt in the Old Testament for places where it talks about the coming of Jesus and look at those prophecies.

You don't need a devotional guide to read your Bible and to get into helping our students understand that. And then adding a Christmas carol or two, and especially some of the ones that they might not be so familiar with, I love, love, love, love those old, old hymns that we only ever sing around this time of year and some of our churches never sing, like, "Of the Father's love begotten," or, "Let all mortal flesh keep silence," or, "Now who was to rich beyond all splendor?" These beautiful old hymns that have glorious words and think deeply on the incarnation and picking apart one of those and listening to it over and over makes it part of a Christmas tradition and makes us, as well as our children, better thinkers about the ideas of Christmas instead of just the traditions of Christmas.

- I love that, Tim, I really do. I know, I love Christmas music, Christmas music, even the same old, same old hymns that we always sing at church for Christmas. But I remember as a teenager, because I had always loved the hymns before, I remember one Sunday as a teenager when I was preoccupied with something that was going on in my family and I realized this thing that I'd always loved, I was just on autopilot and I wasn't thinking about the words at all.

I was missing, and it came to me, I am missing it. I am missing what's important about this. I'm not thinking about the words. I'm not letting the words draw my spirit to the Lord's. And ever since then, it has been important to me to think about the words.

And sometimes I will, in my devotions, just read Christmas hymns and it can be very profoundly moving when you're not just moving your mouth to the tune that you're really thinking about the words. I like that suggestion. - Yeah, and some other ways to sort of expand from that core of scripture itself.

The Hallelujah Guide, which is written by Cindy Rollins, is a lovely devotional. It looks at the Advent season through the lens of Handel's Messiah. And so I would commend the guide to you. It's a good one for sort of wrapping in some stories and some poetry and some hymns, along with the part looking at the great master work by Handel.

But even that, putting that music on, because its words are nothing but scripture. And it's a beautiful thing to meditate on and to fill your home with a beautiful music as well. - Yeah, yeah, I can remember. David and I used to love, we used to go to a live performance of Messiah every year when we were in college and when we would come back home to visit that area.

And so we loved it, and we found a young Messiah recording that we enjoyed, and we played it for the girls. And so they grew up thinking of that as Christmas music. And the funniest thing to me was when my grandson, who's now almost 18 months old, was really little.

I was at my daughter and son-in-law's home one day and Gideon was just all upset. And so my daughter said, "Well, play his calming music, go turn on the calming music, turn on the calming music." And it was Messiah. And I said, "Oh my gosh, you're playing Messiah for this baby?" And my daughter said, "You know what?

It's the only thing that calms him down." And so music can speak to the heart of our very youngest family members. And so I really like that suggestion. It resonates with me, Tim. - Yeah, and then the last thing I would add is as you're doing some of those school activities, right?

The academic stuff, finding some ways to incorporate those hymns and music, even there, some of our old friends in Christmas hymns come from Latin texts. So you get, "O come, O come, Emmanuel," right? Is, "O come, O come, Emmanuel," or, "O come, all ye faithful," right? "Adeste Fidelis." You can take those and do some exercises, some Latin work, but do it in a way that's going to bless your thinking as well, right?

You're thinking about the season and not just your ability to do some translation. I love it. I love it. Tie your work to your faith and your celebration. That makes all of it better. - We're doing that just the other morning with, "O come, O come, Emmanuel," looking at the chorus, right?

That in English says, "Rejoice, rejoice." "Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel," right? But in Latin, it's, "Gaudae, Gaudae." And then the word for, "will come," in English, is actually, "nascetur," which is a passive voice for being born, right? So it's echoing that great verse, right? That, "For unto us a child is born." And so you can make these lovely connections and it doesn't have to be a big production.

You don't have to have lots of guides. Sometimes it's just looking at the words themselves and wondering at the marvelous things that God has done. - Oh, that's beautiful. I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go and look that up myself. I think that's what David and I will be doing at suppertime tonight.

That's a great suggestion. Okay, last question for you, Tim, before we go. If you asked your kids, what would their favorite read-alouds be at Christmas time? - Well, they really do love when we read the best Christmas pageant ever. That's definitely near the top of their lists. The Night Before Christmas, the poem, my parents recorded for them one of those audio recordable books of it.

And so that comes out every Christmas time and they listen to it over and over. And yes, like you with Linus, they've memorized significant sections of it without even knowing they were memorizing it. - Absolutely, absolutely. - And then the one that they'll also sometimes ask about is that one that makes Papa cry, which is the gift of the Magi.

- Yes, yes, yes. Oh, and see, it'll make them cry when they are a Papa themselves, okay. That's great. Well, Tim, thank you so much for sharing just a little bit about your family's experience with reading aloud and helping our listeners brainstorm some ways to simplify Advent by reading together.

I appreciate your time. And listeners, I appreciate you being with us on this journey of simplifying Advent this year. I have one thing I wanna tell you about that I don't know if you are taking a trip, if you're taking any trips for Christmas break this year, if any of you are gonna be in DC, I wanna suggest that you stop off at the Museum of the Bible.

It's got a lot of interactive, immersive exhibits there. You can get the history of the scriptures. But this year, the museum is putting on, it's called Gloria Wonders of Noel. It's a series of Christmas-themed events that will really inspire your family. It's very joyful. It will show you the historical significance of the birth of Jesus.

There are some daily readings about the Christmas story. There's some choral performances. There's crafts. There's all kinds of stuff going on. There are even some Christmas-exclusive exhibits. I think one of them is called Bethlehem Reborn. So if you're a CC member, you can also get a special discount code for your visit to Museum of the Bible.

And if you want more information on events, you go to museumofthebible.org. And if you wanna find out about your special discount code as a CC member, you go to classicalconversations.com/motb. Okay, lots of good things for you guys to do as you celebrate Advent with your family this year. Tim, thank you again for being with me.

- Thanks for having me on, Lisa. - Merry Christmas, Tim, and Merry Christmas to all you guys. See you next week. (gentle music) you