 Such is the magic of Christmas in childhood… that a single gift can provide one with endless hours of adventure while not even requiring one to leave one’s house. Amor Towles in A Gentleman in Moscow With so much attention on the November election and its potential aftermath, it is hard to believe that the holiday season is not far away. I am doing some light research in case the Christmas miracle is that we do have Christmas this year. What launched my study was a mailing from a large chain store. I received its holiday gift guide, a slender 35-page catalog that I found in a flimsy roll in my four-inch-wide-apartment-sized mailbox. My inner child scoffed at the sight. Talk about shrinkflation! I grew up with the Sears catalog, a compendium of anywhere from 322 to 1,000 pages. I am going to guess that it weighed about half of whatever I did, and it required two hands and a baby brother to lift it into my lap. While it felt disrespectful to Sears and to Christmas wishing, in general, to even consider the flyer a Christmas catalog, I took it to my apartment and smoothed it out on my desktop. I studied the cover. Festive holiday colors formed the backdrop while the featured cover items were some of the classics that have stood the test of time: Barbie dolls, Transformers, and fisher-price Little People. The child in me forced my hand, and I turned the pages. The first page featured gifts “under $10.” There were only nine items in this price category including a Play-Doh Swirln’ Smoothies Toy Blender. Wow! I would have sold my sister for that. Still might. The second page featured items “under $20” and included the classic Lite-Brite. But beyond page two, there were no prices listed as I found myself at a two-page spread for Lego. Perhaps the price tags were missing because today’s parents already know they will need to apply for a mortgage and provide the bank with the credentials of the builder. Curious, I turned to Google for a price check. Most of the Lego sets were priced at $99.99 or more, some topping $499.00. When I was growing up, I could have purchased my first car with that amount of dough and it would have come assembled. Flabbergasted, I moved on to the next pages where my beloved Barbie had been given a two-page spread with similar displays for Disney and fisher-price. Deeper into the catalog, I smiled at the pages of familiar board games many of which still line my closet shelves. The classics still in my possession are also still in the game of games: Clue, Life, Monopoly, Operation, Sorry, Trouble, and the ancient Battleship. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but Nerf had an entire page devoted to its guns. They have gotten much larger and more varied. Nerf now makes a machine-gun named the X-shot Insanity Motorized Rage Fire Blaster. Just keeping up with the times…Rage and insanity, the name says it all. After that bit of discouragement, I rejoiced to find that the arts have not gone out of style. There were pages of craft kits with more Play-Doh items, Crayola products, and the ancient Spirograph. Even a few books were featured on page 27. I was all the way to page 29 of the 35 pages before holiday tech made an appearance: lots of dull-looking headphones, controllers, and keyboards. All-in-all this slim catalog didn’t stink, but it sure did shrink. It made me wonder what has happened to the magnitude of our wishes and the enormity of our gratitude. When I was a child we wished hard and expected little. We hoped something special would arrive by sleigh. We marked just about everything in the book in hopes of getting one item that we prized. Our minds got a workout just by looking and imagining. I closed the catalog filled with mixed emotions: the old joy I felt as a child along with the sadness of wondering what has happened to childhood and imagination in the age of technology and AI. I saw into a future in which the human mind becomes as flabby and diabetic as our bodies did in the age of conveniences. I don’t think I ever realized how much our young minds grew just from imagining what we could do, what we would do. And then, after the present arrived, what we did do: all of those hours of Barbie dramas, Erector sets, coloring books, Play-Doh, improvisation, playing games, learning rules, taking turns, it all amounted to something. Now, at this stage of my life, the thing I prize most is my mind, the one that grew from all of that wishing, imagining and playing. But then came the October surprise. About a week after receiving the catalog, a coworker reported that her nine-year-old daughter watched an old-time detective show on television. The child was fascinated by the lack of technology and the way the investigators used their minds to solve the case. “I want to do that!” she said in awe. Awe and ah! A Christmas miracle in October! I plan to give her the Christmas catalog and show her how it’s done.
2 Comments
 When I was in third grade we had a special program at school one day. It was about telephones. Not all students had phones in their homes. This class intended to introduce children to the rotary telephone. We practiced placing calls, answering calls, and basic telephone etiquette. In addition to the proper words to say in greeting, we had to have some lessons on polite use of a party line. Back then not everyone had a private telephone line. Some had shared service. A person might pick up the phone to dial and find that there were other folks already talking on the line. Of course, the courteous thing to do was hang up. There were other more interesting options such as joining in the conversation or silently gathering intel on fellow citizens, hence the special lesson. No mother wanted some eight-year-old smarty-pants eavesdropping and dishing dirt on the neighbors. This telephone education curriculum was put together by Bell Telephone, THE telephone company. Each student was provided with a thin booklet explaining the history of the telephone and discussing potential advances. The information in the booklet described a future in which callers would be able to see each other while talking on the phone. A sketch was provided of a large desktop phone with a small square screen. That seemed far-fetched, like having a television in your phone! Even a few years later, we found it silly when the bumbling spy, Agent Maxwell Smart, made calls from his wrist…the old wrist phone trick…on the show Get Smart. It was unimaginable that a wrist phone would be in our future or that one day we would carry a palm-sized phone in our pockets that would do computing, face time, GPS, games, and movie streaming. There have been other unimaginable events that have actually occurred in my lifetime. I remember overhearing the conversations of adults after Dr. Christian Barnard completed the first heart transplant in South Africa in 1967. Unimaginable! And was it ethical? Would this really be allowed to go on? People feared that they would be struck over the head and dragged off to some dark alley where black market organ traders would rip out the hearts of the unsuspecting and leave them for dead. No one could have imagined a time such as now when 3500 hearts would be transplanted in a single year or that other organs would be harvested to save lives. And all of this is done in hospitals with sterile surgical technique. Many of us know or live with someone who has had an organ transplant. People are casually asked at the BMV about their desire to donate. No black market, just long lines. And no longer inconceivable or scandalous. In 1969 I watched on a black and white television screen as the first man walked on the moon. Eleven others have done it since then in living color. As I write this, private entrepreneurs are preparing for tourist travel in space. Our children will go to school with other children whose parents and grandparents have walked on the moon, and in the future, our kids may travel in space on spring break. People are already signing up. No longer unbelievable. What once we could only imagine has now become ordinary. We’ve grown accustomed to our technology and the speed of change. We don’t imagine, we expect new and futuristic products to roll off the line with frequency. We seem to have the ability to create and prepare for the things we can imagine. (Although I am still waiting for the Maxwell Smart shoe phone. Sorry about that, Chief.) Now faced with a virus that has the power to take us back in time to the Middle Ages, it is mind-boggling to realize that our best remedy is as simple, as difficult, and as low-tech as staying home. It seems like a Stone Age intervention leaving some people incredulous, angry, impatient, and unbelieving. Perhaps, in the long process from rotary phones to iphones, from automobiles to aerospace travel, we have become smug and lost our regard for the past and what it has to teach us. We failed to plan and to prepare—to imagine and to believe. |
AuthorLilli-ann Buffin Archives
June 2025
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed