The World We Imagine

 
 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.
 

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