“Is there some kind of sale going on?” a grandmotherly-looking individual asked the cashier at a toy store on Wisconsin. It was a sparkling weekend morning and the aisles were positively seething.
“Nope,” said the cashier, “It’s just birthday party season again.”
So it is! September comes nine months since the cozy seclusion of the winter holidays. And school is under way, which inflates the number of “friends” that the resulting birthday children are expected to invite to their celebrations.
Thus across Washington and the suburbs, during arguably the most beautiful weather we ever get here, innumerable families are strapped into their cars each weekend en route to large, deafening, expensive gatherings that fill adults with ennui and often, perversely, leave the guests of honor in tears.
“Well, his real birthday is in August,” a young mother was explaining loudly to an acquaintance she’d encountered in the toy store’s arts-and-crafts aisle. “But, you know, he wanted his friends from school….”
In a corner, two children were rolling around in a heap of plush toys. Their parents stood at a short distance, scanning the high stacks of boxed toys in search of a birthday gift that would generate the maximum amount of pleasure for the least possible outlay.
This is an important and largely unacknowledged aspect to birthday-party attendance. No one wants to look cheap, but at $20 a pop, minimally, children’s gifts can add up.
The toy industry understands this, which is why it knocks itself out to produce entire container ships full of gaudy pointlessness that will enable parents to keep their heads high. And most toy stores — except those that chiefly stock pricey, eco-earthy-handmade-in-Germany wooden playthings — reflect this by filling their shelves with boxes that are far more exciting than the toys they contain.
The ultimate gift of this sort, by the way, surely must be Sea-Monkeys. Remember them? Children really believe that the tiny packets of eggs, when emptied with special crystals into a special, jolly tank of water, will hatch into tiny, personable mermaids and mermen.
Alas what children tend to get is a special, jolly tank filled with cloudy water that becomes murkier by the day until their mother throws it out. The disillusion of Sea-Monkeys, the gulf between cheery packaging and reality, used almost to be a marker in childhood. Maybe it’s better now; perhaps technological advances have produced not only genetically modified salmon, but also brine shrimp that can survive in a child’s bedroom.
At any rate, things were getting fragrant at the toy store. “Sorry,” said a mother as she got a whiff of her crawling son. “Whoo boy,” she gasped, hoisting him on to her shoulder with one hand while trying to balance two small-but-respectable boxes of Legos in the other.
The cash register dinged. It dinged again.
Behind the counter, store clerks were furiously wrapping brightly colored toys in brightly colored paper. Children were grabbing, grown-ups were hustling, and everyone was late. Yep, it’s birthday party season again
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
