"The Giving Manger" Recap

Stock photo of a Chinese family eating dinner. Image source.

So at the beginning of December I wrote that I was going to do this Christmas activity with my son, called "The Giving Manger," where you can write down the good things you did to help people, and those strips of paper are the straw in the manger for Baby Jesus. Here's a follow-up post about how it went.

Basically it went really well! In my blog post at the start of this, I said I wasn't sure about it because I don't like the idea of "gamifying morality", but it didn't turn out that way. Discussing the things my son did to help people, writing them down, and telling him he did a good job- these are not enough of a "reward" to incentivize him to "game the system." So that was good.

It wasn't about doing good things for artificial reasons. It was about spending time talking to him about what he had done each day, and helping him to identify which things he did which were good things that helped people. He already does nice things because he's a sweetheart. This activity was helpful because it made him more aware of those things, and also helped me pay more attention to them.

One nice thing that he does a lot is serving food to us at dinner. This is sort of a Chinese-culture thing- during a meal, people will randomly put food in your bowl. It really disturbed me when I first came to China, because I don't want people all up in my space without asking first, and I don't like when I feel like people are pressuring me to eat- but Chinese people do it to be nice, and I learned that I can just tell them "oh I already have enough, thanks" and that's fine. Anyway, my son has started doing this- like randomly scooping food into my bowl. Very cute! Though sometimes I have to tell him not to do it, if it's something I don't want to eat.

So, anyway, overall, both of us enjoyed doing "The Giving Manger," and it was basically a way of noticing the good things that we already do.