NOTHING FOR ME, THANKS"
SKINNER, DAVID
Casual NOTHING FOR ME, THANKS This year for Christmas, get me nothing. A lot of it. After moving house recently and boxing up all our possessions, I’ve concluded that we have too much stuff....
...I think a child’s natural desire for possessions should be tempered by a sense of limits...
...Well, if a larger volume of art supplies really leads to a keener sense of shade, light, and color, then the scribbled drawings on my refrigerator must be masterpieces...
...Nothing” doesn’t begin to describe what I would like them to receive...
...It has since been augmented and replaced by far more sophisticated pots, pans, oven, and so on...
...As a result I have already in my possession many more toys than I can ever play with, and they are taking up a huge amount of space in my parents’ house...
...My wife and I obviously have some disagreements to work through...
...You’re lucky I’m so restrained...
...And of course she has this huge elaborate kitchen...
...I say replaced, but what I really mean is that the old toys are simply buried in bins, corners, boxes, and bookshelves behind the new, better toys...
...Have you been to McKenzie’s house...
...In the movie Heartburn, Jeff Daniels’s character complains that his diminished sense of color comes from having grown up with a box of 8 crayons...
...In fact she just entered the room where I’m working and, knowing what I am writing about, demanded to read the work-in-progress...
...Why just the other day,” I’ll intone, “Her Highness was saying how measured and sober was the king’s opinion on the royal children’s toys...
...Call me a snob, but imagining that they are working the drive-through is just not what children should be doing at play time...
...DAVID SKINNER...
...Children do like to play at what they see adults do...
...It’s like a doll emporium...
...This year, when you come down the chimney, instead of leaving me a nice dollhouse or a new educational game that whistles annoyingly when I correctly identify a letter, please take away a few of the toys I already have and deliver them to someone else or, if all the other kids also seem to have too much stuff, just throw mine in the garbage or recycling...
...The fi rst one was a humble wooden kitchen that was so tiny, with rounded edges and paintedon burners, that, more than anything, it looked like a story book drawing of a kitchen...
...Say hello to Mrs...
...Tomorrow, while my wife’s out, I think my daughter and I will play Royal Family again, and we will talk about how much the queen appreciates her husband’s wisdom...
...If my wife, Cynthia, has her way, our daughter will receive for Christmas this year her third kitchen set...
...I know, for instance, it must be drawn before your offspring comes to own an item like the one I just spied in a Lillian Vernon catalog that came in the mail...
...What drive me nuts, though, are the toys that mimic adult things...
...If I were writing my daughter’s letter to Santa, it would go something like: Dear Santa, Due to the proliferation of cheap consumer goods out of China, the price of factory toys is artifi cially low right now...
...Claus and Rudolph, Madeline, 4 My two children have many times the quantity of toys I remember from growing up in a house with six children...
...This 40-piece toy set includes a fabric visor, headset, and a walkie-talkie for playing cashier at a fast-food drive-through...
...It has this great stovetop and oven range, refrigerator, sink, and more appliances than my own kitchen...
...Anyway, the new kitchen my wife wants to buy her for Christmas looks like we could make Thanksgiving dinner in it...
...So while there are gifts I should like to receive—a nice bottle of wine always hits the spot—what I most want this holiday season is less of everything...
...Play time is for imagining the extraordinary...
...If only he’d had one of those nicer sets of 32 or 64 crayons, everything might have been different...
...This goes double for my children...
...Thanks...
...After rolling her eyes and shaking her head in disbelief, she accused me yet again of knowing absolutely nothing about what it’s like out there, how many toys other parents buy for their children, and how, in fact, our home is a study in toy austerity...
...It may be far more realistic than the games of Royal Family we play—I’m always the king, my daughter always the princess—but what’s the point of pretending to be something ordinary, something common...
...But the line must be drawn somewhere...
...She thinks I’m insane...
Vol. 13 • December 2007 • No. 12
