Over the holidays we were in Pittsburgh with my wife's family watching The Griswold Family Christmas Lampoon or whatever it's called with all the crazy lights on the house and Randy Quaid. At the first scene with Todd and Margo (the yuppie neighbors) I yelled out, "Ooh, that's us." While not entirely true, to my wife's relatives in Pittsburgh we might as well be. My wife's stepmother judiciously offered, "No, you're just nerds, you're not like that." That's kind of you, I thought. But wrong. We really are those assholes.
Case in point:
Under their Christmas tree were enough presents for seventeen grandchildren. My wife and I stared at the pile fretfully. The only two grandchildren in the room stared at it anxiously. Two years back, we had a sit down with my wife's father to explain that we didn't want them to buy so many toys. Quality over quantity, we said. There was a bit of resistance, but they managed to suppress their Costco urges that year. Apparently it was all forgotten for Christmas 2011.
Every parent draws a line in the sand for what they refuse to allow their children to consume. For some it's non-organic fruits and vegetables or processed foods or violent video games or Katy Perry. Whatever, I say: Bravo. You should do whatever you need to do to fall asleep at night without worrying you're completely messing up your kids. For us it's Disney. I hate pretty much everything about Disney. There was this orientation leader when I went to college who was an adult Disney enthusiast. How is that even possible? It's one thing to simply tolerate the mouse, another to go see Mulan multiple times in the theater without an Asian daughter. This guy was even heading off to that creepy Disney intern plantation the next semester; surely he suffered from some kind of brain damage. I guess some people seem to think that Disney makes childhood magical when all Disney really does is commodify the magic of childhood by turning it into something overly-packaged, disposable, and manufactured under horrible conditions in some third-world country. I am pretty sure the Disney princess-gear sweatshops look exactly like that diamond mine in Temple of Doom only with rows of devices that suck the magic out of Sri Lankan childhoods and sew it into chintzy satin and tulle. I suspect Walt Disney himself isn't actually dead, but living in tunnels under the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, wearing a Mola Ram helmet and devouring the souls of Thai infants imported solely to sustain his immortality.
So yeah, I don't buy my kids Disney shit. We don't watch the gooey melodramas churned out by Pixar, either. Maybe you love that stuff. Whatever. You would probably be horrified to see what we consider nutrition. Every parent feeds their kid some kind of garbage.
I can't really fault our Pittsburgh relatives for buying my kids a bunch of Disney stuff: it's pretty hard not to accidentally buy crap for kids with Disney characters on it, from lunch boxes to toothbrushes to anal suppositories. This is especially true when---like my father-in-law---you only shop at Costco. So the kids ended up with some Tinkerbell thing, a Sleeping Beauty sleeping
bag, a Toy Story carpet, a Buzz Lightning McQueen sleeping bag and
a bunch of other stuff. We can't expect our relatives to buy into our anti-Disney and minimal consumption philosophies wholesale, but we were disappointed that they bought the kids two-bit polyester Disney sleeping bags when they knew about the beautiful handmade quilted ones my wife made them. It's not that I enjoy being a scrooge, it's that we're very consciously trying to equip our kids to handle a culture of overwhelming consumerism (encouraged by corporations like Disney) that is dangerous to both their environment and their creativity.
If I sound ungrateful, it's because I am not all that grateful. And why can't you just be grateful, Todd? I don't know, Margo.
* * * * *
So we've got these wonderful German neighbors who are such sophisticated design nerds they make us look like Randy Quaid and his wife emptying our RV's septic tank into the storm drain. One is a professor of architecture (and since most architects already try to look like Germans, you can imagine how ahead of the curve these two are). They have pretty much every piece of iconic midcentury furniture in their immaculate Mies van der Rohe townhouse. It's like the furniture wing at MOMA.
We had a neighborhood garage sale a few months ago and when this family stopped at ours, the architect saw her four-year-old son having a blast while playing with some of my son's old toys and she said with a delightful German bluntness:
"I see he likes these toys, but the design is not good and they would not really fit in our home."
Sadly, it seems their Bauhaus of cards collapsed this year when their son saw Toy Story and became completely enamored by Buzz Lightyear. I haven't seen a German this enthusiastic about a man in uniform since. . . oh, nevermind. The boy's parents have been extremely good-natured and entirely reasonable about the obsession (his mother made him an incredible homemade Buzz Lightyear Halloween costume) and his prized Christmas present was a Woody action figure (on Christmas morning, he could be heard shouting to his friends across the neighborhood, "Come, everyone, look at my Voody!").
I won't deny a bit of Schadenfreude.
* * * * *
When we got home from Pittsburgh with this Toy Story rug we didn't know what to do with it. We didn't really need a rug anywhere and besides, the kids didn't really know who the bug-eyed cowboy and prominently-chinned spaceman stitched in chemical-smelling acrylic fibers were. They knew the neighbor boy loved them, however, so it was their idea to give it to him. Because of the sensitive nature of the situation in the recipient's home, we knew it would require a covert operation. We would have to put it on the porch right before the boy returned from daycare, so that he would see it and presumably demand that it be given a place of honor at the foot of a Saarinen womb chair (or, perhaps, under a Noguchi side table and four miniature Bertoia chairs). Of course, this operation demanded disguises. The kids chose to dress as ninjas (thankfully, they had already been trained in the ninja arts).
I wore clear-acrylic framed eyeglasses, a black turtleneck, and a man scarf; if caught on surveillance video photographing the operation, under interrogation I would never have broken cover as a Finnish architect in the neighborhood scouting locations for a documentary (there's always at least three or four of those wandering around). My son (dressed in brown) was recon, sprinting from tree to tree, and gazing through the wrong end of his binoculars. Standing in plain sight a few feet away from the windows of the Germans' unit, he determined no one was home.
My daughter (dressed in standard-ninja black) handled the more risky logistics of actually placing the rug on the porch:
A few days later my wife e-mailed our neighbor to admit we were the evildoers, but she thanked us (without a hint of irony) and said her son, "loved the rug." I do hope this was simply politeness and that for their sake the rug is nowhere near those kid-sized Bertoia chairs. Clearly they have more grace than we do. In the end, we spent an entire afternoon preparing for the mission, performing the drop off, and practicing ninja moves in the park.
