Last Sunday was my daughter's seventh birthday (You heard that right, long-time sweet juniper readers. My daughter is SEVEN). She's really into "old fashioned" stuff right now and I've been reading her a lot of Victorian/Edwardian chapter books (Little Lord Fauntleroy, Water Babies, Horatio Alger), so we decided to throw her an old-fashioned surprise birthday party.

We were really fortunate to get to use the new banquet room at Slows BBQ: a long brick-walled 19th-century storefront. I started out by telling the young guests how hard it was to be a kid in the old days, how you had to work all day and never got to play any video games or watch television and if you were lucky enough to go to school you had to walk ten miles uphill in the snow in both directions. "By the time most kids were your age," I said, "They would already be drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and complaining about their arthritis." We printed out a bunch of Lewis Hine photographs and spread them out on the tables as proof. A few days before the party I found a bunch of newsie caps, vests, and other old-timey clothes at the thrift store so we had a huge box of dress up clothes for the kids to transform themselves into urchins (some even arrived in old-fashioned clothes). I set up a photo booth so I could take pictures of each kid in costume for a party favor. I wish I could share some of those pictures, but I don't want to upset any parents by putting their kids' faces on my "weird internet thing." Here are mine:

I got a few rolls of shiny new nickels from the bank and set up various stations for the kids to "work," including a newspaper-rolling station, a lego "factory," a cloth-flower-making station, and a human whack-a-mole game (the kids earned a nickel for being the mole).

I was going to buy a bunch of coal and make the kids go into this creepy tunnel in the building's basement to get it out, but my wife vetoed that idea. That was probably for the best. We served baked beans, cornbread, and mac&cheese. I wanted to make them eat slumgullion style out of tin cans, but my wife also made sure that didn't happen (another good call).

At the back of the room I set up a soda fountain (The L'il Sugar House) where the kids could exchange their nickels for gumballs, old-fashioned candy, and marbles. We served the birthday cake (made by Jess at Astro Coffee next door) with root beer floats, Boston coolers, chocolate milkshakes, and for the adults we had bottles of old-timey soda (dandelion, sarsaparilla, cream soda, and birch beer). Although we kind of threw the party together last minute, there was a rush of preparations so my daughter knew something was up. She thought it was just going to be a low-key gathering at our house with a few close friends. You should have seen the look on her face when she walked in the door and saw nearly all her friends and classmates in costume as they shouted Surprise!

My favorite part of the party was the silent cinema we set up in the back of the room. I blocked off one corner with curtains and put a few rows of chairs together. I'd put together a playlist of some of my favorite kid-friendly silent movies (Snub Pollard's It's A Gift, The Little Rascals in Dogs of War, the soda fountain scene from Buster Keaton's College, Fatty Arbuckle's Coney Island, the opening scene of Mary Pickford's Little Annie Rooney, the best parts of Chaplin's The Kid, Chaplin's dance of the dinner rolls, the eating machine from Modern Times, the clock scene from Harold Lloyd's Safety Last, and many more). Our friends who loaned us the projector even let us borrow their popcorn machine, which we served in little paper bags like at the real movie theater:

I stood there in amazement at a bunch of little urchins watching silent comedies and munching on popcorn in a makeshift theater:

I couldn't believe how much the kids enjoyed those movies. A few pictures I took of their faces show them as captivated as those kids Alfred Eisenstaedt captured so beautifully at the Parisian puppet theater. All during the party, kids wandered in and out of the little theater, and I couldn't have been happier about it.

I'll put a few more pictures up on the Sweet Juniper Facebook Page, if you're interested.

See previously:

For appetizers we served possum fritters and raccoon-stuffed mushroom caps

It just occurred to me that over the past year, several of my law school classmates have stood before the venerable justices of the U.S. Supreme Court to field difficult questions of law, with answers that might find their way into the annals of American jurisprudence.

My son just asked me, "Does The Beastmaster wear underwear?"

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.

It turns out that rug might have been the most fun present the kids received all year.

I put a few of our favorite pictures from 2011 in a slideshow; most never appeared on this site. When I see all the fun stuff we did this year all chronological like that, I feel less bad about all the arguing and frustration that also went on between this dad and his six and three year old kids. Because trust me: there was plenty of that too.

The song is "We Don't Need Much," from the excellent self-titled album by Durham/Chapel Hill's Mount Moriah (one of our favorites in 2011). The song is used with permission (thanks Heather!). Be sure to check out this video for the song "Lament" and see the band live if they come to your town (they'll be in Detroit on February 8, 2012).

Thanks for reading in 2011.

This year we were excited and honored to have author and illustrator Heather Ross do the portrait and hand lettering for our 2011 holiday card. Half of our daughter's dresses are made from Heather Ross fabric and we have admired her illustrations for many years (so it was a special thrill to have her create this card for us). For the subject, Heather chose our annual trip up to Eastern Market to get a tree. My wife says, "Somehow, each new Heather Ross fabric seemed to perfectly match our daughter's interests. It started with her mermaid line, then unicorns, and then, most recently, playing with horses. For her birthday I'm making a quilt from the latest line, and I hope that years from now, when our daughter has nearly forgotten how she played with toy horses on the floor of her room for hours at a time, she'll look at this quilt and remember. Heather Ross captures the magic of childhood." I'm so glad my wife convinced Heather to do the card (left to my own devices, I might have asked this guy to do it).

Every year I get more and more excited about this tradition; I love the idea of having new artists with completely different styles capturing our family each year and I love the results even more (here are 2009 and 2010). Happy holidays, everyone.