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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
1 Comments
Santa Guilt
I think it was the fifth time in seven days that I heard from someone that he (or she, but yesterday it happened to be a he) felt bad for lying to his children about aspects of Christmas, namely Santa Claus. In this case, again, he said that he felt reasonably all right telling the story initially but his child began asking detailed questions about how Santa operates, how he gets around, his personal interests, that sort of thing.
This sort of self-consciousness and guilt is a little bit alien to me because my family did a lot of storytelling and had a very non-literal approach to . . . most things. So I don't think my parents would call any discussions of Santa and his activities "lying" any more than they would think about the questionable truth behind my father saying: "If you raise your hand to your mother, it will fall off."
My memory is that talk about Santa's abilities to be everywhere at once were explained with the single word "magic" and we all tended to make up our own stories about what might be going on as we saw fit, but overall, I probably believed in Santa about as much as I believed in the Greek and Roman gods (with whom I had an obsession) or any other mythological thing.
I didn't ask any of the people I talked to who felt queasy about the Santa fabrication if part of their discomfort came not so much from the problem of lying but from a conflict between religious beliefs and utter fabrication. Since I was raised with no religion, but was taught many of the fundamental Jewish and Christian narratives (and took the New Testament as Literature in college), my own conscience isn't plagued by telling my kids about Santa. Santa stories aren't so wildly different from the things we make up about our terrier's activities when we go out and he invites his dog friends over or has crazy adventures.
But I am curious about the problem. People feel terribly strongly about this and I am surprised, not that people do care so deeply about speaking the truth to their kids, but about how I am only now, in almost the fifth year of being a parent, becoming aware of this particular conflict. Is it a newer bit of guilt or was it just waiting until my kids were old enough to appear? (This is not to say that I feel guilty about this thing. I don't. This is one area where I surprisingly have no feelings of conflict. And to be honest, it is way too early in the season for me to even talk out loud about Santa. I still don't know what to do with the children over winter break.)
posted by Elise at 8:06 AM
2 Comments
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