In America, we have holidays that are distinctive to our cultural preferences. July 4th is the holiday we celebrate with booze and explosives. Thanksgiving is the holiday we celebrate by eating until we can't see our own faces.
We've also taken other holidays and made them distinctively American-- bringing the best of out other holidays into the mix as well. The Christmas season features the booze, the overeating, but mainly it's a celebration of capitalism. Add New Year's Eve and you've also got more booze and explosives. It's the most wonderful time of the year.
To ramp up the capitalism angle you've got your Black Friday, your Cyber Monday, your Doorbuster Saturdays and your Chartreuse Wednesday. If going out and fighting your way through the unwashed masses isn't for you, then you've got the Interwebs... and catalogs.
Someone keeps leaving catalogs in the break room at work. Just near the coffee pots. I assume this is some kind of effort at being green-- which Kermit tells us isn't easy.
Last week an American Girl doll catalog appeared on the break room table. The eight-year-old girl who still lives in the nougaty center of my soul took a look and recognized that if she were able to get out and play, she would have spent the last three months following her mother around with a dog-eared copy of this catalog talking non-stop about the pretty pretty dresses and the cute furniture and oh look! This one comes with a dog AND a pony.
And even 36-year-old Bitter Manda can appreciate the cost and time that goes into making a doll totally by hand. Bitter Manda is pretty sure American Girl dolls are manufactured in China.
It was a pipe dream. There was no way my mom was going to drop that kind of cash on a doll, even if she could have afforded to.
That was my Red Ryder Carbine Action Range Model Air Rifle.
When 8-year-old Manda told her second grade class she wanted an "adoption doll" for Christmas-- during some kind of bent sharing time-- the other kids laughed their asses off. And 8-year-old Manda did what she always did in second grade when the kids were laughing at her: she turned her desk over while still sitting in it.
The following Christmas, everybody had heard of "adoption dolls," and every one of those kids from second grade were sending their parents over hell and half of Georgia (literally) to find one. The Little People got renamed Cabbage Patch Kids; they were mass produced, and the shortage made $150 for the original version seem cheaper than cheap.
And to boot, it seemed like everybody's grandmother was trying to figure out how to make one in "soft sculpture" to try to appease the kids whose parents weren't going to be able to deliver the real goods. Those were dark days. Those were pre- eBay days.
It was also maybe the first documented time I was ahead of the curve.
Because when everyone was going crazy in 1983, I already had mine. Got her in 1982, and to this day I don't know how my mom managed to pull that one off. She had blonde pigtails, and a pink dress with butterflies appliqued on it. Her name was Dorothy. She went with me pretty much everywhere for the next few years-- until it became creepy to carry a doll around in public, then she became a throw pillow on my bed. And she still lives in the closet at my mom's house, waiting to be passed along to those hypothetical offspring.
So, in December, I celebrate capitalism the same way I have since I was in college. I go to my local big box store and unleash 8-year-old Manda in the toy department. I fill up a cart, then I take those bags to the local Toys for Tots drop off. They're not my offspring, but they're also not hypothetical.
Posts
