An All-Season Curmudgeon

This is a long-ago wander down memory lane...hope you packed a lunch.

I am VERY happy our two children are out of the buy-me-that-toy-for-Christmas phase. I am also pretty sure they both wish their father were as well, but you can't have everything and at my house, that's a lesson you can't learn often enough.

Many years ago, I endured the traipsing from store to store in search of Furby, an object whose appeal eluded (and still eludes) me. Our little girl wanted one and that was good enough for me. I think she ended up with no more than two though my recollection is that there were battalions of different models of these little dust bunnies available. I was always proud I resisted the temptation to train it to speak incredibly rude sentences (but only just).

She, and we, collected beanie babies with a little more vigor than we pursued Furby, but their saving grace (when was the last time that phrase was used in connection with beanie babies?) was that you collected them all year round, they weren't specifically tied to this time of year (I keep visualizing the Gift of the Magi at the original Nativity where each of the Wise Men gives the Baby Jesus a different Beanie Baby.)

I know I've gotten old when I recoil in dismay at the must-have, mucho-buzzed-about toy, Zhu-Zhus, a robotic rodent (so much for alliteration; it's actually a mechanical hamster) that neither eats nor poops but does all the stuff between those two actions and whose scarcity has driven the price into the stratosphere for moms and dads shopping for their special someone.

Zhu-Zhus are actually going, at online auctions, for more (by two and threefold) than it costs to donate for the care and feeding of a third-world child, or (dare I say it?) one much closer to home (ask your local equivalent of Children and Family Services department). 

I'm not sure how anyone can walk past one of the bell-ringers with the kettle this season and NOT put something in for those in need if they've already given a zhu-zhu a good home. And if the past is the prelude to the future, in a couple of years, as part of local collections to help the hungry and indigent, our children will be donating their now unwanted zhu-zhus to those in need of a roof or a warm coat. 

I suppose if you're a real live hamster, that turn of events will constitute a happy ending, at least until the next trend surfaces.
-bill kenny