It’s that time of year. The holidays, Christmas, Chanukah and more are celebrated. Bright lights, holy symbols, and wintery decorations galore. It’s also become the season where folks no longer greet people with naming the holiday.

Parenting is tough. There are tons of things you want to teach your children. Tolerance should be at the top right? Well I’d like to take a stance and tell you that ignoring holidays, especially religious ones, isn’t showing tolerance, it’s showing fear.

Raising my boys in a Christian household, we’ve always celebrated Christmas. The birth of Christ is what it means for us. Beyond that though, this season represents a time of love and caring. My wife and I did our best to teach our sons love isn’t how you feel, it’s how you act.

I’m blessed in my adult life to have friends from not just a Christian background but Jewish, Muslim, and even atheists. I want my family to be as loving and caring to them as anyone else. So I’ve been teaching them, and my friends I hope to give up avoiding religious greetings but instead return them with gusto.

When someone greets you with Merry Christmas or Happy Chanukah, it’s not about them forcing anything on you. It’s about that person sharing a blessing with you. Teaching your children this is far better, in my opinion, than teaching them to avoid that greeting.

Your son may not hear it from his teachers, or the store clerk, but that’s no reason to not encourage him to say it himself. As long as your child is saying it in the spirit of love and sharing of joy, then it’s not an attack. Likewise, when a friend says Happy Chanukah to him, your son will respond with ‘and also to you, and Merry Christmas.’

Help your children along this path to tolerance this year by not just reminding to great others kindly and in kind, but doing other things as well. Take them out to purchase appropriate cards for their friends of other faiths. Teach them to accept those same cards with joy and honor.

Also, consider making time for you and your child to learn about other religions. What they believe in relation to what you believe will open may doors for discussion. A perfect opportunity will be manger scenes, menorahs and more.

This year the granddaughters and I are going to play dreidel. I received one as a gift from a Jewish friend. They’ll just take it as a fun game, but I’ll be able to share a bit of culture along the way.

What will you be teaching your children this holiday?

Todd Jordan is a father of two boys, now men, and grandfather to three lovely girls. He writes on his own blog, The Broad Brush, and can be found on Twitter as tojosan.