Concordia TheoBLOGical Seminary

Here’s a fun article from the Wall Street Journal on cutting and felling your own Christmas tree. It’s about a father and his two sons who are beginning a tradition together. It’s a bit romantic, but it’s good to see fathers and sons doing dangerous and (dare I say it) manly things with each other.

It reminds me of this book that my wife and I got when we had our first son just over a year ago, entitled The Dangerous Book for Boys by the Iggulden brothers (the Amazon.com link has a video advert to watch with it–it’s hilarious). The book includes How-tos on making secret ink, building go carts, making the perfect paper airplane as well as the history of how to re-enact the great battles of history, or how to ask a girl for a dance, how to tie the five knots every boy (and man for that matter) should know.

Why did they write this book? According to the introduction: “Because these things are important still and we wished we knew them better. There are few things as satisfying as tying a decent bowline knot when someone needs a loop, or simply know what happened at Gettysburg and the Alamo. The tales must be told and retold, or the memories slowly die. . . . Men and boys today are the same as they always were, and interested in the same things. They may conquer different worlds when they grow up, but they’ll still want these stories for themselves and for their sons. We hope that in years to come that this will be a book to dig out of the attic and give to a couple of kids staring at a pile of wood and wondering what to do with it.” Now that’s fun to imagine.

In a sense it is sad that we need a book to engage what is hardwired into us, but in a sense it is the product of our Playstation times. We have been learning how not to use our imaginations since I was a kid with the pervasiveness of television and video games. Now we need help engaging our cultural memory once again. What’s interesting is that we haven’t given up danger, we have only given up safe danger. We don’t use our imaginations to encounter danger as kids, but we use reality to encounter even more dangerous activities in our adulthood. Since we don’t know how to imagine, we can only encounter the reality, and that is the benefit of the book. We learn how to imagine again, with a little help and prodding from the Iggulden brothers. Don’t worry it’s relatively painless, like riding a bike.

What are some traditions and rituals you fathers do with your own sons?