Confessions Of An Indulgent Father

I grew up in the late 1960s, heyday of anticonsumerist sentiment. My parents held strong prejudices against any toy made of plastic, and had a rule (not quite a rule, more a mental reflex) against buying any plaything advertised on television. While I chafed against these attitudes at the time, there's no question the rule made an impression on me. Today, I don't enforce the no-plastic, no-advertising rule of my youth against my children. Their rooms are jammed with Barbies, Power Rangers, Hot Wheels and other lurid mass-produced treats. And yet somewhere in my soul the old Puritanism still makes itself felt.

Each year when my wife comes home from Hanukkah-shopping, my eyes boggle: Must they get quite so many toys? Her reply is always the same: she looks at me with large eyes, and says, 'But this year they've been such good children. They want the Hot Wheels Demolition Derby/Las Vegas Showgirl Barbie/Men in Black Deatomizer Blaster so badly. And look: it was all on sale.' She always prevails.

And maybe she's right. Season after season, my resistance to the materialism of the holidays weakens. Think of all the things you do for your children. How many of them will they even remember? Out of the thousands of trips to zoos and museums, hundreds of holiday excursions to alligator parks, monkey cages, northern lakes and southern beaches, they retain only the vague afterglow of a happy childhood. Last week, I got a letter from a Grade 8 teacher, who in passing,
recalled a field trip for which my father had done the driving. I was appalled to discover that, while I remembered the trip, I had no memory of my father having been there.

And of those things they will remember, how many will they actually enjoy? It truly is for their own good that we discipline them, but they, naturally enough, don't see it that way. Later, maybe, they'll be glad we took them to church or synagogue every week, but at age seven or eight, they'd rather be home watching cartoons in pyjamas.

Homework; dress codes; curfews -- all for their own sake, and all struggles.

But there's one thing we do for them that brings them pleasure now and that they never forget -- the gifts they get at this season of the year. Even now, when I come across an old broken piece of childhood junk, I can recall when I got it and whom I got it from. It may be the wiles and manipulation of Madison Avenue that cause children to so desperately hunger for this or that piece of extruded plastic. But they do hunger for it, and with an avidity that overwhelms our
adult appetites at their greediest. Why not give it to them? Not all the time -- we all know the harm that does -- but on a holiday, when their yearning is at its sharpest, and when it's the season for giving.

And once one enters into the spirit of it, it's even possible to enjoy the sheer gaudy insanity of the world of modern children's toys. Haim Saban, the billionaire inventor of the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, was recently the subject of a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal. It detailed his untiring effort to top each of his inspirations with something even more outlandish. He woke up in the middle of the night in his Beverly Hills mansion last year, burning with his latest inspiration. He shouted the title of his newest cartoon series out loud, waking his wife. She groggily asked him what he was yelling about. 'I've just had a brainwave -- fighting, talking cats with superpowers. They're
called the Pizza Kung Fu Cats.' Long pause. 'I feel sorry for you,' she said, and went back to sleep.

Little minds are not good at abstraction. It's hard for them to understand our love for them independent of the ways we show that love. For them, really, the material and the spiritual are fused. It's silly and ridiculous and often painfully expensive. The lines at the toy stores are intolerably long. But it's only once a year. And while the toys quickly break, in the ways that matter most, they last forever.