Family Daze: Toys you wanted as children

This may come as a surprise to some of you, but one of the major perks of being a parent at Christmas time isn’t the tree or the eggnog or the holiday parties or anything like that. It’s the toys. Face it, having a child gives you a handy excuse to go ahead and buy all the toys your parents never got around to buying you when you were little.

Take several years ago when I bought my daughter an Easy-Bake Oven. Now for those of you who were lucky enough to miss the seventies – when I was growing up and had one of my own – and have no idea what I’m talking about, it’s a pink, plastic oven that children can use to bake all sorts of astonishingly decadent cakes and confectionery treats. The principle behind it is to teach six-year-olds that with just a little parental guidance they, too, can churn out things like, say, French Canneles and Rum Babas.

Now, like most people my age, I’ve distanced myself from the disappointments of my childhood, but I still remember how badly I had wanted one each Christmas. In fact, I’ve always suspected that my lack of cooking talent can be directly traced to not having an Easy-Bake Oven somewhere in my past. So the year my daughter turned six (the legal baking age according to the box) I finally got to fulfill my Christmas fantasy.

Except, that is, for one little problem. In my frenzy, I hadn’t taken into consideration the Number One Rule of Toys. Which is, any seasoned parent will tell you, that everything on television is smaller, messier and a lot less fun in real life. There are few exceptions to this rule, but, believe me, the Easy-Bake Oven is not one of them.

Ok, so maybe it was the shock of seeing the teeny-tiny cooking utensils and the three inch cake pans after all these years that caused my bad attitude. Or maybe it was because the oven required a 100-watt light bulb. And, tell me, who on this planet has one of those hanging around Christmas morning?

Of course my daughter was ecstatic. She immediately took it into the kitchen, opened a miniature bag of cake mix, added the required 1.8 ounces of water and stirred. In desperation I took a red twinkling light off the tree and screwed it into the oven.

Now I know what you childless people out there are probably thinking. You’re thinking that only a person under the influence of certain pharmaceutical medication would use a Christmas bulb to bake a cake when there are perfectly good ovens in the house.

And, I must admit, you’ve got a valid point. Especially since three hours later we had a half-cooked three-inch cake. More of a cookie, really.

But don’t waste your pity on me. Save it for my friend Susan who, last Christmas, bought her five-year-old daughter the same battery-operated cash register that she had always wanted as a little girl. As a reward for her thoughtfulness, Susan then got to spend most of last January trapped inside her house re-buying all of her furniture with fistfuls of plastic coins.

"Ever since she got it, all she wants to do is stay home and play a little game called ‘Make Mommy Buy Stuff,’" she said to me in a shaky voice one day over the phone. "When I ask her how much something costs like, say, the ottoman she says something like ‘a bazillion million cents.’ And then I say, ‘How about a quarter instead?’ Then she counters with a gajillion trillion and we spend the rest of the day going round and round until I finally make an offer she’ll accept."

So, hey, things could always be worse.

Call it nostalgia. Call it naivete. Call it what you will. But, face it, no matter how much we know better, we’re not going to stop buying our kids the toys we always wanted but never got for Christmas.

And me? Oh, someday I’ll probably change my ways and buy only useful and practical gifts for my family. But for now I’ve got to hurry and get to the toy store.

I hear that Lite Brites are on sale.

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Debbie Farmer is a humorist and a mother holding down the fort in California, and the author of Don’t Put Lipstick on the Cat. You can reach her at [email protected].