If this has never happened to you, it may seem simple. In the end it’s about raising a small sum and choose a nice thought to thank our children’s teachers. For kindergarten, nursery school and elementary school, the collective ritual of Christmas giving survives: what’s wrong with saying thank you to those who take care of our children every day, you ask? In theory, nothing. In practice it is a demanding exercise that is impossible to avoid, even if you hate it.
It’s just as tiring as buying and carrying toilet paper and wipes, remember meetings and interviews, remedy unexpected events and find material of all kinds. But the gift falls in December, when you are already very tired and busy: it is the simulacrum of the mental load of school tasks. In the movie Childrendove Paola Cortellesi and Valerio Mastrandrea they are a couple who have just become second parents, there is a calendar to complete with post it notes from week to week, which is essential for dividing the tasks equally. There’s the “laundry to do”, “pick up the kids from school” and the “class chat”, which is the only one to end up burned. This is good advice: the only way to manage class chat well is to not be there.
Chat communications which are often in English or in three different languages more or less known by around twenty adults which undoubtedly are not known. They hurriedly pass each other in the morning while they put slippers on the children before accompanying them to the class of teddy bears or seagulls and no one has a name, if all goes well they are “the mother of”, “the father of”. The contemporary aggravating circumstance is that of voice messages: if one of the group starts, it’s over. Out of laziness or spite, even if it were just to say “the candle with the initial is fine, thanks”, everyone else does it too. Another obstacle: if the diffusion of virtual currency was measured on chats, we would be in a really bad situation. The money is delivered by hand or in envelopes inside the lockers, accompanied by a dozen WhatsApp messages, perhaps audio, to ensure the success of the operation.
As the number of children increases, the amount of material to remember and deliver increases: from toilet paper to wipes, through markers, sheets and scissors up to thermometers. And every year in class chats we struggle to find a gift for the teachers, even if the teachers say the same thing every time we ask them: we need school supplies. Markers, sheets, scissors. Best of all a voucher on Amazon, but the one at Ikea is also popular. On The post the journalist Arianna Cavallo collected the voices of Milanese educators. Protected by anonymity they confess what all of us, after giving away candles and pendants and cups and bubble bath, had suspected: they don’t want gifts, because schools lack everything else.
We are absolutely used to bringing into schools what would seem absurd to us anywhere else. Like toilet paper, which is also guaranteed on the train, although not always pleasant. And during these Christmas holidays, both in Milan and Turin, there were those who had to bring a stove to school as a gift, because there is neither toilet paper nor heating. We welcome the collective ritual, the community that puts a little bit into doing something beautiful, we endure the wear and tear of chats to say thank you, even if with an ancient symbol like the Christmas gift. Given that we are traveling with the stove in the bag, even Santa Claus, the real one, would have some difficulty.