Posted on 01/01/2025 5:10:09 PM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
Most weeks, the last thing we think we need is to add another event to the calendar, especially an event that requires a gift and possibly our help supplying the refreshments. Yet when the bulletin announcement appears or the email invitation arrives for a baby shower, immediately adding it to our calendar is the right response.
If the shower were for our sister, our niece, or our own daughter, we’d certainly block off the time, no questions asked. But why?
Baby showers are a way a culture bestows value and honor to mothers and infants, unborn children, and growing families.
Baby Showers Aren’t a Waste of Time
It’s not just a chance to eat together, although that too is valuable for a community. It’s not just a church function everyone feels obligated to perpetuate. That’s a bad attitude talking. It’s not just a time to give supplies and gifts to a needy couple, although that too is valuable for a community. If the gifts were the point, then if the family did not need anything, there’d be no reason to put on a shower. If the gifts were the point, then it is not your presence as part of the community that matters but that you purchased something they needed.
In Leisure: The Basis of Culture, Josef Pieper writes that “the highest form of affirmation is the festival.” He continues, “To hold a celebration means to affirm the basic meaningfulness of the universe.”
When we celebrate something, when we gather convivially, festively, to honor a person and an occasion, we are declaring with our hearts and time — with ourselves — that we are part of something larger than ourselves.
Baby Showers Celebrate Life
To hold a celebration of a new baby is to affirm that life is...
(Excerpt) Read more at thefederalist.com ...
We need to bring back the honour of being a father as well.
Excellent advice.
It’s a very kind idea.
Some other nations take extraordinary measures to increase the stigma (and difficulty) for males, who remain single, such as unique and higher tax rates for single males, and limiting certain programs and job prospects exclusively to married fathers.
What a nice thing to do.
True. I admit I cringe when there’s a wedding or baby shower at church, but I need to change my attitude. Affirming marriage and families is important.
Some men are simply out of luck relationship-wise. It's not really fair to them.
I don’t want to be punished for my permanent singleness. I think we can bring back the culture.
Seems rewarding married men and women with tax breaks would be better...and culturally supporting them more than “single moms”
“...What about men, like me, who have never been blessed to have lasting families of their own? I’m divorced but it seems I would be taxed too (if not even more discriminated against).
Some men are simply out of luck relationship-wise. It’s not really fair to them...”
I don’t want to hijack the thread, so this is the last comment I will make on this particular subject, but I’m in a similar boat, minus the divorce (thankfully). All I can say is that I’m thankful that I live in a country, which doesn’t practice such policies, as I’m almost aged-out of possible fatherhood at this point.
When we were done having kids, we called Catholic Charities to see if they had any new mothers in need of baby items. They put us in touch with a single mom and her sister. The young woman was 9 months pregnant and was going to bed her newborn baby in a pillow lined drawer. She started crying when we gave her a crib, changing table, couple high chairs and pack and plays as her mom was going to babysit the newborn and needed items as well. Gave us an appreciation for what we had.
Makes me cry just hearing about it.
So good of your family to do; what a blessing to that mother and baby!
They do that at my church.
We support a missionary family who attended our church. They recently adopted a native baby from an unwed mother situation where they live in a remote village in Alaska.
The church women are doing a long distance baby shower.
Our small congregation welcomed 14 babies in 2024. We are awaiting 4 more so far in 2025. And, yes the church ladies throw big showers for the new parents.
This intentionally marginalizes fathers.
Fathers should be just as celebrated, as parents to their baby daughters and baby sons, as mothers are.
Not everything as to be about everyone.
“ We need to bring back the honour of being a father as well.”
Yes.
And boys becoming men .
And girls becoming women.
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