When I was a little girl, we had a very strange VHS tape we watched only at Christmas. It was a cartoon about a little orphan boy named Jeffery who ended up locked in a toy factory on Christmas eve before being adopted by a family that knew Santa. I can’t really tell you anything more about the plot because there wasn’t one. It was just random musical numbers designed to be sentimental and confusing. One musical number involved all the toys prancing around a tree and singing “When the toys come alive on Christmas Eve it’s such an amazing sight!” but after that number the toys fell down, lifeless again, and were not a plot point for the rest of the show.
I have not seen that video for fourteen years, but I was humming the song about the toys coming alive on Christmas Eve last Friday, as I went to Wal Mart. And I’ve had it stuck in my head ever since.
I hadn’t been to Wal Mart in months. We still don’t have a car, and the bus isn’t very safe during the pandemic, so we shop only at places we can walk to. But I had a doctor’s appointment at the medical building across town that day. I didn’t have a choice but to hop on the bus, and the only bus route back to my house stopped at Wal Mart first, so I got off in my mask to go shopping.
Besides the grocery money, I had a small wad of money my friends and I had pooled to buy Christmas presents for a local family on a fixed income who’d missed the cut to ask charities for help. They have two little girls and nothing to give them, so we combined our resources. This is my favorite thing to do at Christmas. As we’ve established on this blog many times, I love to shop.
But I didn’t know where to start buying toys for little girls I hadn’t met. I was quickly overwhelmed.
The whole of Wal Mart has been rearranged to accommodate social distancing, which meant I had no idea where anything was. I finally found them where the hardware and paint used to be. There were three whole aisles jam-packed with items, organized according to color scheme, as toys are: all the ghastly pinks and purples marketed to girls in one aisle, all the lurid reds and blacks marketed to boys in the next, all the cheerful rainbows marketed to babies in the third.
Rosie gets offended at this arrangement. She has strong views on the marketing of toys to children. I once used the word “androgynous” in front of her, and she questioned me sharply.
“What’s androgyinst?” she asked.
“Androgynous means it’s neither for a boy nor for a girl,” I answered. “It’s for whoever wants to use it.”
“MOM,” said Rosie, staring daggers at me. “EVERYTHING is androgynist.”
But I didn’t have Rosie with me to tell the world that everything was androgyinst. I was shopping for two girls I didn’t know, and there was nothing androgynous in the store.
I picked up standard coloring books for the four-year-old and elaborate mandala coloring books for her sister. Rosie likes to color; most children do. I crossed the store to the candy aisle and got packages of chocolate and candy canes for stocking stuffers, avoiding the issue of what to get next. Then I went back to the toy aisle.
My eyes swam with the sheer volume of garish things. I felt like Alice Through the Looking Glass, standing in the sheep’s shop where items disappeared whenever she looked at them.
Toys have changed since I was Rosie’s age. They’re edgier and less fun-looking than I remember. For example, I used to have several Troll dolls, which my mother called Wishnicks. They looked like elderly babies with paintbrushes for hair and they had sparkling rhinestones for navels. Nowadays, Troll dolls look completely different. They have neon colored clothing and backstories, and their hair is not so delightfully unkempt.
Dollhouses have gone downhill as well. They’re all all pink, ornate, and vaguely sassy-looking. I couldn’t find any generic dolls for imaginative play, only alarming figures in tank tops with big overly made-up heads. I couldn’t imagine a girl playing with that.
When I was a child I played with Fisher Price Little People, which my brother called Weeple People. Weeple People were just plastic spools, the female spool a little more curvaceous than the male spool, without arms or legs. The spools were topped with a pink or brown spherical head with a blank expression, and sometimes with hair or a hat. The hats and blank faces were the closest things that Weeple People had to a predetermined personality; I used the one Weeple Person whose blank face was frowning as a bad guy, and the one in a cowboy hat as a farmer. The rest of the characters could be whomever I liked.
I sometimes acted out lurid murder mysteries, with the frowning Weeple Person as the killer; occasionally, one of the smiling Weeple People would get trapped under the elevator of the Fisher Price Parking Garage. Once I acted out the Brothers Grimm story of the Goose Girl. One Weeple Person wearing a sawtooth cap played the part of the king, and a Weeple Person with red hair and freckles played the part of the Goose Girl. I got called away to lunch while I was acting out the part of the story the king tells the poor princess to “tell your troubles to the oven if you won’t tell them to me” and the Goose Girl goes and wails her tragic life story into the oven while the king listens to her through the chimney pipe. My father came in later and was perplexed to find the redheaded Weeple Person with her head in the dollhouse oven.
Rosie does not have Weeple People in her life. She does have a vintage Fisher Price parking garage with an elevator, a Barbie Dreamhouse we pulled off the road before Bulk Trash Pickup, and a collection of Calico Critters furniture. Her imaginary world is populated with Japanese UltraMan action figures, which she buys with her allowance, playing the part of the grown-ups; and G. I. Joe Cobra action figures, which are on a much smaller scale, playing the children. The UltraMen are masked and the Cobras wear balaclavas, which is pretty close to the generic and open-ended nature of the Weeple People. She pretends a utopian world where the policemen, called “rescue heroes,” are also firefighters, construction workers and medics; they battle imaginary villains she’s named “The Honey Creek Truth-Teller” and “The Clink Lady.”
There’s also a set of minor characters called “The Street Worshippers,” who take part in liturgical flash mobs all over town. Once they blocked traffic by holding a Latin High Mass at an intersection. Just the day before, she’d pretended that the Street Worshippers had invaded the diner where the dollhouse family was enjoying supper. They processed in, “one man wearing a priest’s robe, one man carrying a Bible, and one man wearing a Jewish Ceremonial Robe, and two men carrying an altar.” By “Jewish Ceremonial Robe,” she meant the ephods the priests were wearing in her cartoon of Joshua and the Battle of Jericho. The Street Worshippers had declared “We’re here to preach you a Christmas Eve Vigil!” The restaurant manager had to shoo them out. I think she’s been in Steubenville too long.
My head was full of Weeple People, Grimm’s Folktales, UltraMan and the Street Worshippers as I stared at the riot of toys.
I couldn’t think of what a normal girl would play with at all. I have been female my entire life and given birth to a female as well, but I have never known what girls like. I can’t imagine any sort of human being enjoying playing with the toys in the pink aisle. And the black and red one was all guns and Minecraft.
I finally settled on blocks, Candy Land, Connect Four, two stuffed bears, and a kit for making your own hardback books. I spent the rest of the money on more art supplies. Then I started to go to the grocery section for my own shopping. Just as I did, I saw the most magnificent play set in the world: a boat with a diving cage, tranquilizer guns, two scuba diver scientists, and three different sizes of shark.
Santa is bringing that play set to Rose, out of the grocery money. I hope the Rescue Heroes and the Street Worshippers have all kinds of ocean adventures on Christmas morning.
I went home and hid the shark playset; then Rosie and I gift wrapped the girls’ presents.
“It’s important to give them nice things,” said Rosie, working diligently to divide the candy into two exactly equal piles. “Because they still believe in Santa. If he didn’t bring anything they’d be upset.”
“I am so proud of the person you’re becoming,” I said earnestly.
We carefully set the gifts in a bag and placed it by the door to walk to the family’s house.
Just at that moment, I really did believe in Santa.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.
Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross.
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