I know I’m not supposed to embrace the “more gifts” approach to Christmas. But all I want for Christmas this year is more toys for my kids. I do. I covet all sorts of shiny and colorful things that I know they will love. My budget is tight, and I am trying to be financially responsible, but I see things other kids have and I want my kids to have that too. It is absolutely politically, morally, ethically corrupt to admit that, at this time of year especially, but I am fearless. I want more toys for my kids.
Like what, you ask? Oh, I want a play kitchen. I want a big one with high counters for my nearly 4 year old and lots of doors for my toddler. I want the wooden one, not the plastic, if I am completely honest, though that makes me sound like an organo-parent, which I am not. I embrace the plastic, usually, but the wooden kitchens are just so damn cute. Am I convinced they’d play with it? I am. Our basket of toy food and plastic dishes come out every day. Every surface of my home is covered with a bounty of snacks and meals, all plastic, served at regular intervals. Our chef costume is used far more often than our fairy dresses. In a toy store, my daughter admires the metal pots and pans like a foodie fingering the Staub. I’m done with tea parties, I want cooked foods now. Sure, I could build a faux play kitchen out of a box, draw stovetops on the desk, make a microwave out of a cereal carton. I’ve heard great things about how kids and cardboard boxes go well together. But I want the kitchen.
I want six new board games for my nearly 4 year old. We play Candy Land, and I want more variety. I’m done with sticky licorice and King Candy’s Castle. There was an ice cream parfait game I saw that I thought looked good. And a balancing ship one that looks fun. I like the togetherness of board games and I can’t wait until my girls and I can have game nights. Now, when I offer a third game of Candy Land, my daughter usually demurs and we look for another option.
Oh, the puppets. I’m a sucker for puppets. Finger puppets especially. My toddler loves to pull out our collection one by one and make me put them on my finger so she can pull them off, and then have me put them on her finger so she can pull them off. But we just have a few cheap animals, one girl, one boy, and one grandmother, and I’d love ALL the other finger puppets. All of them. I want wizards and witches and chefs and babies and dragons and eagles.
Fancy hats. I’d like a lot more weird play hats in our house. We’ve got the firefighter and the construction hat, two elf hats and a tiara and a chef’s hat. I’d like all the other ones. Not necessarily the entire costumes, just the hats. And I want them adjustable, to fit both the elderly mother and the tiny tot. There is a pink velour top hat with birthday candles that my daughter adores each time we see it in the toystore. It’s $30 and I just can’t do it. Even if we used it every birthday until both are 20 years old, it seems expensive.
I want blocks of every variety. I’ve spent nearly an hour debating the wooden blocks versus the foam blocks, and went away without buying either. Duplos versus legos and the debate whether girls are ever really interested. Now I’ve seen wooden blocks with magnets (swoon) and Magnatiles and Superstructs. I want them all. I imagine us building cities together. We have a few Duplos and some Bristle blocks, but they don’t get much love and I want to try others before we give up on engineering altogether and are sucked entirely into girldom.
And electronic toys. Yes, I know I’m never supposed to admit to liking anything but organically grown cooperative toys made of felt and bamboo, or something, but this year I am coveting an educational hand-held preschool toy. No, not the pod or the pad – I don’t even have one of those, so my kids cannot have one either. But a gateway electronic toy, the marijuana of gaming world, the entry drug into the mind-sucking addiction that begins with sounding sounds and tracing letters and feeding an electronic pet. I think my unschooled child would adore the feedback of that.
Books. I want every children’s book ever written, though we already have hundreds. But the baby is going through the pop-up and lift-the-flaps with gusto, and my glue stick and scotch tape only goes so far towards saving Alphabet Bugs. I love those damn bug books, and so do they, and I want all the new ones. And all the going-to-school storybooks for my preschooler. All the animal fables for my animal lover. All of the song books and the treasuries and the alphabet books, the Seuss books and the very first chapter books for reading aloud at bedside.
And I suppose here is where I should admit I want more than toys for Christmas. I want a new snowsuit for the elder child. I penny-pinched and bought a used one, and now it needs some sewing to fix a zipper, and I caught myself admiring a playdate’s winter coat, surreptitiously, when the child was visiting our house. It was reversible, purple on one side and floral on the other, and it felt like down. Soft. Slippery. Plush. Warm. I even picked up her boots, admiring how they, too, were the very best boots on the market, with removable liners. The toddler this year is wearing her sister’s old snowsuit, and it is perfect and warm and still new and shiny. The zippers are re-inforced, the sleeves have pull-down covers for tiny hands, the piping is reflective, the buttons firm. My budget was clearly bigger when I was buying for my single baby, four years ago. I want that snowsuit, in a size 4, in red.
So there it is. A materialistic, self-absorbed, self-pitying wish list for Christmas. Toys and books and fancy snowsuits and boots, even though you cannot swing a cat in our house without hitting toys or outdoor clothing. There are millions of children on this earth without toys, there are thousands of families without a roof over their head, there are mini financial crises in more homes than ever. My children are in good health. I am too. I am grateful for that. I’m grateful for the roof over our head and the toys we have and the clothes that keep us warm while we play our hearts out in the snow. I’m grateful we have an outdoor skating rink near the house, and I’m grateful my daughter can now skate along with me, holding my hand, three out of the last three days. I’m grateful I have parents who give generously (and even offered a new TV, a topic for another post – when to accept financial help). I’m grateful for friends and family and the love we enjoy this holiday.
Defensively, I’ll also say that last year, I coveted nothing for my girls. For Claire’s birthday, I said she needed nothing, and to wrap second-hand toys or regifts, so she’d have the pleasure of receiving something without the drain on money or the earth’s resources. But now, just turning 4, she seems on the cusp of so many new things, capable of such different play, with clear interests and skills, and I see a million things that she’d like every time I’m in a toy store, for real or online.
I suppose it is our culture these days. We want to give our children everything. I want them to have everything wonderful in the world. Even though I know, I KNOW, the most wonderful things in a child’s life cannot be bought. And I even know this desire of mine is not about them, it is about me. My girls are too young and too sheltered from popular culture to even ask for anything for Christmas. So this year, they’ll get a few carefully chosen things, two good books, and chocolate something in their stockings. They will be thrilled. Me too. And then we’ll bake some gingerbread cookies together, and go skating, and play Candy Land, and I’ll forget all about the shiny baubles I coveted in the weeks before Christmas.
And next year, I promise I’ll write a blog about appreciating the small things in life.