Sometimes presents should just be fun

From this week's Brentwood Home Page:

My 7-year-old son Owen got hold of the Toys For Us catalog, as his brothers called it when they were 3, and circled everything he wished he could have for Christmas.

Most of his choices didn’t surprise me, since he always wants Legos, building sets, spy stuff, board games and video games. Bur one selection made me question my parenting style.

He had circled this kid-sized, battery-operated police car, a Dodge Charger “Hemi” with lights, a siren and a working megaphone.

It was WAY cool.

The problem is that my husband and I have always had a policy against those vehicles. We never bought his older brothers the Power Wheels Jeep, even though they would have loved one, of course.

No, we were those parents who thought our kids’ toys should have standards. We wanted all our recreational purchases to improve our kids in some way. Why spend $300 on some toy that just carries them around the yard? Let’s get them a Kett car, which is pedal-powered, so they can use their leg muscles. You know, get some exercise while they’re having fun?

That’s what happens when you apply adult thinking to your kids’ gift requests. Presents aren’t always supposed to teach a lesson. Sometimes they’re just supposed to be fun.

We were pretty uppity about TV and video games too. I was so proud that my older boys never saw an episode of Spongebob Squarepants until they were 7 or 8. We’d managed to keep them safely ensconced in the world of PBS Kids for all that time.

Of course, what works in your family doesn’t work in other families. I witnessed one son’s first brush with peer pressure at a birthday party for a fellow preschooler who was a big fan of Pokemon and Power Rangers. When he opened the gift from my son, a copy of one of our favorite Little Bear videos, he looked at his mom like, “What am I supposed to do with this baby video?”

That right there is painful. I don’t care how old you are.

We’d also heard all the doomsday reports about the effects of the Xbox on kids, so we staunchly avoided any video games. We were so smug about our approach. Then we found out that our kids turned into drooling zombies who played video games the entire night when they’d go to sleepovers at the homes of their lucky friends whose parents did buy an Xbox.

So we caved and have since owned a Game Cube, a Wii and an Xbox.

Now that my oldest boys will (hopefully) head to college in four short years, I’m rethinking my toy policies.

Last summer we finally bought the Deadliest Toy on Earth, a trampoline. It was officially the best thing ever for about a week. Now, just like every other trampoline in the neighborhood, it sits in our yard, “safety net” drooping, waiting for a day when the boys have friends over so they will play on it.

Still, I’m glad we got it. Life is short, right?

I’m pretty sure Owen knows he won’t get a police car he can drive this Christmas. I mean, he’s over the age limit and I know he’s over the height limit. But I admire his optimism.

I like the fact that he quietly went over my head and circled the car anyway, hoping Santa at least might bring it down the chimney.

If he does, I know two 14-year-olds who would drive that thing all around the yard whether they fit in it or not.

But I’m still not getting them TVs for their rooms.

This week's Brentwood Home Page column

Click here to read about yet another reason my youngest child may need therapy in a few years.

This week's Brentwood Home Page column

Our countdown calendar says fourteen days until Christmas, one day until Mom loses it.

Getting in the Christmas spirit

I don't shop at The Fresh Market often because I'm not rich or an empty-nester; that seems to be their target market whenever I go in there. I mean, I don't think Fresh Market carries the box of 44 fish sticks, if you know what I mean. But my mom and I strolled through yesterday because Fresh Market always has a great holiday candy display that gets me in the giving mood.

I should have taken a picture of the candy, but I couldn't think once I passed the pastry case in the one photo I did take.

I have to go lie down now.

Deck the halls with pilgrims and turkeys...please!

While driving around Brentwood today I noticed that both Brent Meade and Fountainhead subdivisions have decked out their entrances with Christmas decorations. So I guess it's on, y'all.

Still, I wish somebody would just designate a day already when everyone is supposed to put up their outside decorations at one time so we wouldn't have to endure these awkward few weeks when some people hang tinsel and garland while others, like me, still have pumpkins on their porches.

It's bad for my chi to see competing seasonal gee gaw out there. It absolutely drives my son Henry insane. He gets so put out when he thinks people or stores bypass Thanksgiving and head straight for Christmas. I would not be surprised if he starts a "Give Thanksgiving its Due" Facebook group.

I guess not everyone wants to extend their "harvest" celebration one minute longer than they have to. If you think about it, though, at no other time during the year does this seasonal overlapping take place. You never see valentine hearts competing with Christmas lights or shamrocks getting in the way of the Easter bunny.

Wait, I just noticed that Thanksgiving is at the tail end of November this year, which means there'll be less time between Black Friday and Jesus's birthday to get all my decorations up. Guess I'd better go chuck those punkins!

RIP cheese grits

So Christmas is gone already. I just packed it all up and my husband hauled it up to the attic. Even though I started buying some things in October, it still snuck up on me. But I was determined to complete some holiday rituals even after deadline. I didn't get to make cookie-press cookies until Dec. 27th, and we constructed our gingerbread house on New Year's Day. But we did it.
For future reference, remind me not to try to make ANYTHING that requires standing for hours trying to squeeze ever-hardening icing out of a plastic pastry bag when I've stayed up till the wee hours the night before. At my age, simply staying up late makes me feel hungover. Note to self: Never again.
Another thing I know I won't ever make again is cheese grits. I found out the hard way that Kraft has stopped making the garlic cheese roll that is essential to good cheese grits. The recipe I use is the one my grandmother used, out of Southern Sideboards, the most excellent cookbook published in 1978 by the Junior League of Jackson, Mississippi. I don't know why Blogger won't let me put these pictures in the middle of my post. Anyway, sorry about the microfilm look of the cookbook photo. I'm being lazy today. And I took the garlic cheese photo from a lady's blog whose name excapes me, but I'll find it. It's the only photo of the rare garlic cheese roll I could find.

The cookbook is so awesome because it notes who submitted each recipe the proper way, by her married name. My cheese grits recipe, actually called Cheese Grits Souffle, was submitted by Mrs. Louis E. Ridgway, Jr. and calls for one roll each of Kraft garlic cheese and Kraft Nippy cheese. Nippy cheese went by the wayside years ago, but both used to be staples in the refrigerated section between the real cheese and the canned biscuits (which my other grandmother calls "womp" biscuits because of the sound they make when you womp the can on the edge of the counter to open it.)
As a weird child, one of my favorite harbingers of Christmas was the sight of the little green-labeled roll of garlic cheese in the fridge.
Believe me, I am not the only one who's pissed about this. Southern ladies around the Internet are ranting on all kinds of online forums. Women in Pass Christian, Mississippi, in particular are up in arms.
With them on the job, Kraft should at least trot out the garlic cheese during the holidays, kind of like peppermint ice cream.

One to grow on

“Oh, you poor thing,” the Dillards clerk exclaimed as she copied numbers from my driver's license onto the check I’d just written. “Born on Christmas Day! You really got ripped off, huh?”
I glanced up from my checkbook, where I’d been trying to remember what I did with check #2642. Already that morning I had battled my way through Stein Mart’s customer service line to exchange a sweater, and I still had Toys R Us looming before me. For expediency’s sake, I stood ready to agree with her.
I couldn’t do it, though. Whenever anyone finds out I was born on Dec. 25, they always react with sympathy and attempt to comfort me about my bad luck. It makes as much sense as when grandmotherly strangers try to console me for having three boys and no girls, as if I could have -- or would have -- done anything about it.
The truth is, though, that I hadn’t thought much about my birthday falling on the biggest holiday of the year. Maybe it bothered me a bit when I was a kid. We were never in school on my birthday, so I didn’t get to see Mrs. Turner draw a birthday cake with my name on it in colored chalk on the blackboard. Since second grade, however, I’ve gotten over it.
A Christmas birthday does lend itself to interesting variations of the usual holiday practices. As a child, I left Santa a piece of my birthday cake instead of milk and cookies. And contrary to the apparent consensus of many Cool Springs store clerks, no one close to me has ever forgotten my birthday or tried to pass off one gift to cover both celebrations.
Of course, I do have to wait all year if there’s a gift I really would like to ask for, but that’s gotten easier to overcome with each birthday.
In fact, my family members have always gone out of their way to make the day special for me, from their cheery “Happy Birthday!” in response to my “Merry Christmas!” greeting to the specially designated birthday presents wrapped in paper that is any color but red or green.
Remembering those times, I realized right there at the cash register that being born on Christmas Day is anything but a rip-off. I know of no better day to come into the world than when peace and joy reign, when a child’s anticipation is almost unbearable, when people in every nation rejoice to commemorate a birth that changed history.
Sharing a birthday with Jesus Christ is a great blessing to me, and that store clerk inadvertently reminded me why. Christmastime can be hectic and stressful. But it’s also when most of us are intently focused on someone other than ourselves.
Every day, but especially on my birthday, I have the chance to thank God for gifts I’d never want to exchange.

Fake-tree huggers

This is the year we Burgins bought an artificial Christmas tree.
Our last enchanted experience selecting the perfect tree from the Home Depot outside garden center converted us into fake-tree people.
Nothing against The Home Depot, of course. It is what it is. I knew going in that taking my family there to buy our tree would not resemble that commercial where the Budweiser Clydesdales are pulling a sleigh full of smiling models with hatchets snuggling up to a hot beverage during a holiday tree-seeking expedition.
No, our escapade played more like an episode in the Dr. Phil house -- still with the hatchets, though.
Once Henry overcame his initial embarrassment over his dad’s cold-weather getup, he was surprisingly game. Mason, however, had a social studies deadline bearing down on him, Tim kept counting down the minutes until tip-off in the UT/Memphis basketball game, and Owen spent the entire time boycotting the buggy.
Toddlers can be ruthlessly critical shoppers, anyway. If it wasn’t their idea, nothing will please them. Of nearly every tree Tim picked up, Owen said, “Not that one. We don’t need that one. That one’s not good for us.” Never mind that we never asked him. We just needed a tree big enough for our immense collection of ornaments made from kid footprints.
Oh, how far Tim and I have sunk from those kidless days when we’d go out to dinner, then peruse the selection at what my friend Andrea calls World’s Most Expensive Christmas Trees, Santa’s Trees on Moores Lane. You get what you pay for, though. Each of their trees is fluffed out and spaced so you can walk around to evaluate its shape and fullness.
Back then, I thought nothing of plunking down $90 to $100 for something we’d throw out in less than a month.
We’ve always been staunch proponents of the “live” Christmas tree. “You can’t beat the smell!” we’d say. “Picking one out is a tradition.”
Well, scratch that last one. Somehow we forgot we live on the low-ceiling side of Brentwood and came home with a 9-foot tree we had to cram under our 8-foot ceiling like Will Ferrell in Elf.
While our tree tradition has degenerated into a blindfolded dart throw, recent advancements in fake trees are staggering. A Web site called Balsam Hill offers what they call True Needle technology so lifelike, I’ll have to convince my friends it’s fake! Their pre-lit trees are “thoughtfully strung” to guarantee no wires are showing.
Next year I’ll just be thoughtfully strung out.

Have yourself a military Christmas

I put this tiny Nativity scene on Owen's "desk" in the playroom and found it like this today.

I'll bet the wise men didn't expect to see snipers on the roof protecting the newborn baby Jesus. Joseph apparently keeps up with NFL stats as well.

Jesus rocks, too

While listening to a tobyMac song as we drove to his brother's basketball practice, Owen said, "He doesn't sound like he's singing about God."

List-ful thinking

My grandmother turns into a list bully around October.
She lives in the Land Between the Lakes, but she and I call back and forth quite often. Without fail, she springs the question on me each fall.
“So, you got your Christmas list ready?”
Say what?! Christmas? In October, I’m up to my jack-o-lanterns in homemade Halloween costumes. But my grandmother’s been contributing faithfully to her Christmas Club account at the bank, and after ten months of saving, it’s burning a hole in her bank book. She always wants a list from me, my husband and my kids. If I can’t produce, it’s Sears gift cards for us.
Of course, kids just write down anything they could ever want, regardless of how difficult it may be to acquire since, after all, Santa handles those logistics.
However, not everything on a grown-up Christmas list is easy for grandmothers to come by. I would never send her to the Paducah mall for a Bjork CD or ask her to fork over big bucks for my coveted 10-inch Wustof chef’s knife. That’s for husbands to do, not grandmas.
So, not meaning to patronize, I write some, let’s say, less coveted items I wouldn’t mind having, mainly to make my grandmother’s life easier. I tell her I need a new white turtleneck or a UT sweatshirt because mine is all pilled and, yes, I promise that’s all I really want for Christmas. Based on these lists, I’m sure she thinks I am the most boring person on earth.
For Christmas, I try to think of what my relatives enjoy, trust my own taste and hope they agree. I don’t ask for Christmas lists because I think shaking down a family member for a list reduces gift-giving to running errands for them, as in, “I picked up that white turtleneck you said you wanted. Oh, and Merry Christmas!”
Of course, that’s not what Nanaw’s doing. She’s just trying to get something she can be proud to send, something she’s confident we’ll enjoy. If she reads this, I’m confident I’ll get a coal-filled stocking upside the head.
I have been keeping a list of gifts I’ve already received this Christmas, such as my next-door neighbor’s kind attempt to help us light our luminaries with his propane torch. Watching the side of that first bag turning black and the sand melting will be a treasured memory.
The Loveless Café’s mail-order business has been a blessing, as are the Bakers Bridge Avenue shortcut home from the mall and cookie-baking with my boys. I do wish we didn’t end up with so many Cyclops snowman cookies from my little comedian cookie bakers.
Maybe I’ll put that on my list for next year.