The gift sharks are circling. Hungry and anxious, their teeth snapping as they break the surface. Fins ominously cutting through the water, splashing, growing more impatient. Waiting for something to fall so they can snap it up. Their ghost-like cries of, “What does Amelie want for Christmas? Tell me what Amelie wants for Christmas!”
Wait a minute … sharks don’t talk!
But they do in my family. Do you have any gift sharks in your brood? We all do, especially when there are children around. In my family there is only one child, which means all attention turns to her come Christmas time. And that can be a little much. It’s like chum in the water and a full-on feeding frenzy.
One day the catalogs arrived in a big manila envelope. The floorboards in my house sagged, even groaned, as I carried them in and flopped them down on a table like a burlap sack of potatoes. I knew they were coming. My aunt had warned me, but I didn’t expect it would take eight mailmen and a mule to get them to me.
Maybe it was last year that my aunt was put on present probation — told that while the 18,000 gifts she bought my daughter were certainly appreciated (mostly by my daughter,) but we could no longer afford yearly additions to the house for all the stuff she buys.
So we had lawyers draw up a contract for her to sign that stated she could only buy a couple of toys each year, that they had to be approved by us in advance, that they had to be age-appropriate, that they had to be legal in all 50 states and that they had to cost less than the price of college in modern-day dollars.
She squirmed and cussed, but eventually accepted this. Which is why the giant stack of catalogs arrived. She wanted us to leaf through and pick some stuff. Soon!
My dad was about to send his own giant stack of catalogs when I told him not to worry — thanks to my aunt, we already had every one imaginable. Even one from Lithuania, I do believe.
My dad has always been a toy nut, and the harder they are to find, the better. He was battle-hardened 30 years ago when he would have to make epic quests to toy stores all over Tampa in search of hard-to-find Star Wars action figures. Many died trying to bring “the force” to Christmas trees all across the land, and you had to be brave, cunning and even lucky if you wanted your children to truly have a merry Christmas.
Now that my sister has grown up and lives off of gift cards and anything she can open on her cell phone, my daughter provides him a chance for new epic quests. He says things like, “maybe she would like a booster from an original Saturn V rocket?” or “I’ve heard about this Ukranian toy that they’ve only made two of. I’ll need to hike up into the Carpathian Mountains on my two bad knees, so if I’m going to do it, I need to go now.”
My mother has taken to calling me at work to get information on what she should buy. (Actually, they all have, but she’s the only one who calls three times a day.)
At least they’re all asking, and not just buying anymore everything that gets in their way. “A life-size helicopter that really flies! She’ll love that!!!” But it’s put more pressure on us — the parents — to figure it all out. To organize, sort through, limit, divvy out and ultimately police. We had a catalog meeting the other day and a sit-down with the kid. It doesn’t help that her official Christmas list only has four items on it: a toy box, a Pillow Pet, something orange and a real live Shamu.
I think I’ll put my dad on the Shamu. Then the other sharks can fight over the rest.