“After the age of 30, it is unseemly to blame one’s parents for one’s life.” This is one of the rules laid down by Roger Rosenblatt in a new book called “Rules for Aging.” In smaller print, just below the head, the author lowers the age:  “Make that 25,” he adds adjusting the age of maturity.

At a time in history when badmouthing one’s parents after age 30 or more, has become epidemic, a lot of people need  this rule. Especially do they need it if they happen to be clever with the written word. Among others, the daughter of J. D. Sallenger, who published a book about her father this year, could have spared us all the bashing of the famously reclusive author.

There was a time when I felt tempted to violate the rule. From the vantage point of an adolescence that stretched altogether too long, I became too critical of my parents, as my brothers and sisters recognized before I did. For a time I yielded to the temptation to judge my father and mother adversely by reason of their decisions about me and the rest of the family.

Such rash judgments now seem to me in large part a failure of imagination, a failure understandable in a very young adult but not in someone older than that.  I was unable to see my parents as human beings like myself, trying to achieve good things for themselves and their family in a world that they found difficult as everybody else does. It took me too long to sympathize with their struggles the way I would like others to sympathize with mine.

What does this have to do with the holyday/holiday season upon which we have entered? To me Christmas, a day that my spiritual tradition celebrates with intense feeling, always brings me back to childhood. For me, this day is forever connected with parents, family, and times altogether special in forming the values by which I live.

My main association with Christmas has always been abundance. In memory, I recall the earliest days when we gathered in a living room strewn with toys and other gifts. Even the small presents that dropped out of upturned stockings contributed to the general profusion of good things.

This abundance was connected to the goodness of God who, in the faith that my family received as a legacy, had given us the gifts that made Christmas so special. The gifts always turned out to be more numerous than I expected, a sign of profligacy that impressed me from the time that I could first register such impressions. Yes, God loved us – so did my father and mother.

Mind you, the gifts were not lavish or wasteful. They were not intended to outdo what other families gave their kids on this day. And we were made conscious by our socially aware parents that plenty of children around the world had parents altogether too poor to give them what we received.  And, of course, we went to church to thank God, the source of it all.

Christmas, celebrated this way, should have stood as proof that my parents’ love for me was large. The arrangements they made each year to surprise me and their other children testified to they way they felt about us. They were parents who put our well being before their own as they coped with the challenges of each day.

Looking back now, I see them as successful in child raising far beyond that of many other people. They raised six of us and gave us the good physical and mental health, education, and the skills to cope with the challenges of our own lives. The adults that we have become give credit to what our parents gave us.

Of course, I am conscious of their faults too. Looking back at them from early old age, I can easily see how they failed at certain aims. But that makes them like me and like everyone else. If they found life hard, at least sometimes, they experienced what we all encounter. And maturity for me ultimately made me recognize this and put it in context.

So, if someone were to ask What does Christmas mean for you?, I would have to bring my parents into the answer. They taught me to recognize abundance as a sign of human and divine love. The outpourings of gifts that they stealthily arranged for us each Christmas showed forth the meaning of their lives.

This recognition does not sentimentalize my parents. It simply sets them off in the tradition of Christmas celebration when they showed best what they were all about.

Richard Griffin