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Teenie Weenie Town
With the holidays comes no school and somehow a pile of work, so forgive please my long silence. My resolutions for the new decade will involve enhanced productivity and focus. What I will say now is that for a number of reasons, writing here has been quite difficult of late and I hope some new strategy or two will loosen me up a bit more.
What is it about the holiday season that inspires traditions predicated on making the world very very little. I am guilty of embracing this myself with an annual gingerbread house that I have scrambled to produce (with assistance) for the last nine years. But this town is full of binky universes. I have gone now to multiple train shows which miniaturize Manhattan. One is still chugging along in Grand Central Station and depicts all sorts of trains zipping around a sort of compressed city in which King Kong labors up the Empire State Building while Santa sails over some mountain on the far side (very far side) of shrunken Grand Central Station and fragments of street scenes have a kind of Edward Hopper-esque quality, in spite of being surrounded by shiny twinkly things. My children can both spend hours mesmerized by this scene (while I find my mind is often quickly overtaken by thoughts of H1N1 flu).
But this being Winter Break from school, larger excursions are required to keep the kids from pulling my hair out (that's for me to do), so we embarked yesterday on a grand train mission and went up to the Bronx Botanical Garden for hours of fun at their universe of New York (and its environs) landmarks made of botanical bits and pieces around which all sorts of trains chug along. This is a spendy excursion, though it can be extended (as I did) by getting the kids to run around through the gardens and into the "Gingerbread Adventure" area, but the highlight is the trains. It is pretty remarkable to see these likenesses of centuries-old buildings (93 Reade Street, for instance, is there) and impressive structures like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or the George Washington Bridge all looking as if they sprouted out of the hothouse soil they're stuck in, while little electric trains service them. I don't know what my children found so astounding, but they were mesmerized. (It is odd, because I think the very young can be entranced and adults can be interested-- though they might not go if they weren't in the company of children) but kids old enough to really "get" what is going on with the buildings being representations of the buildings they see around town might find it too babyish and uncool.
So what is it about little worlds and this time of year? Is it some sort of reaction to so many Nativity scenes all over the place that we want to shrink or reinvent something quotidian? Is it just that much more amusing to see the world as a manageable set of toys?
I'm not complaining at all. I'm wracking my brains for more tiny things for the children to see before school blessedly starts up again and order can return.
posted by Elise at 11:32 AM
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said...
Your blog keeps getting better and better! Your older articles are not as good as newer ones you have a lot more creativity and originality now keep it up!
1/04/2010 12:38 PM
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