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Sunday 20th December 2009
Batteries Not Included
One of the reasons I’m so embarrassed by this story is that, for weeks now, I’ve been complaining about how greedy my kids are when it comes to Christmas presents. Ludo has never asked for anything as modest as a light bulb before. On the contrary, he has presented me with endless lists, some stretching to several sides of A4, nearly all of which contain items like “S Box” and “Wee” accompanied by detailed drawings in case he’s spelt them incorrectly. He spent the best part of an afternoon drawing a picture of a “Roket” and then painstakingly explained that it wasn’t supposed to be actual size. He wanted a real rocket, one that could take him to the moon. The sheer ambition of Ludo’s requests is quite endearing. Clearly, he is still an innocent when it comes to money. Not so my six-year-old daughter. Sasha knows that if she asks for anything costing more than £25 she’s unlikely to get it. Where she goes wrong is in asking for more or less everything in this price bracket. She is so suggestible that she only has to see an advertisement for, say, Hot Wheels Shark Bite Bay (£24.99), and she wants it. And I mean, really, really wants it, as in runs down to my garden office and tells me she must have it. I often thank God that we’re not yet in the era when you can purchase something advertised on television with one click of a button on the remote control. If we were, the ground floor of our house would look like the mail order warehouse for Toys-R-Us. Some parents don’t allow their children to watch commercial television for precisely this reason, but I’m not sure whether that would make much difference. Sasha would only get to hear about the same “must-have” toys in the playground. When she was four, she came home from school one day and announced she wanted a Nintendo DS for Christmas. My wife asked if she knew what it was since she hadn’t shown any interest in video games before. “Of course I do,” she said. “It’s this really cool machine for making sweets.” We managed to fob her off with a Pez Machine that year. I’m a typically annoying dad in that I agree beforehand that my wife will be in charge of buying the children’s presents and, after she’s wrapped them up and attached labels saying they’re from both of us, I then go out and buy them additional gifts which I hand over on Christmas Day explaining that they’re “special presents from Dad”. This year, I’ve got Ludo a “Lollipop Factory” (£19.99) which has gone down like a cup of cold sick with Caroline. “There’s nothing I hate more in the world than lollipops,” she says. The depressing thing about buying your children toys is how little pleasure they get from them. On Christmas Day, they tear off the wrapping paper, glance at the present with barely-concealed disappointment, then immediately move on to the next one. When they finally get round to playing with them, that involves opening the boxes, emptying their contents on to the carpet, and then mixing up all the little bits into a potpourri of multi-coloured plastic. After they’ve gone to bed, I spend several hours on my hands and knees sifting through this pile, trying to put the right bits into the right boxes. As a general rule, you lose about 10 per cent of the detachable parts every time a toy is “played” with. The worst offender in this respect is Playmobil. Last year, one of Ludo’s godparents bought him the Playmobil Large Pirate Ship (£77.24), a build-it-yourself scale model that consists of over 100 separate parts. Within minutes of Ludo opening it, some of these parts had fallen through the floorboards, others had been kicked under the fridge, while still others were in our one-year-old’s tummy. By the time we’d finished building it, even a bunch of Somali bandits would have turned up their noses at this “pirate ship”. It looked as if it had been stripped bare by Hurricane Katrina. To date, the most successful present I’ve ever bought is a Thomas the Tank Engine train set. While Magnetix and Moon Sand are still sitting in their boxes, having been played with once and forgotten, the train set is constantly being broken up and reassembled. Ludo has now lost interest in it, but two-year-old Freddie has been gripped by Thomas mania and, in time, I daresay one-year-old Charlie will be, too. My only caveat is to advise against buying battery-operated engines. All three of my sons love nothing more than switching them on, leaving them on their side so the wheels spin round endlessly, and then abandoning them. My three least favourite words at Christmastime are “Batteries Not Included”. I’m sure if I actually sat down and calculated what my greatest expense was in 2009 the answer would be batteries. If I had half a brain I’d give up journalism entirely in 2010 and start selling the damn things door-to-door. Earlier this year, we rented a cottage from a retired couple living very comfortably in Cornwall. As they were off to the local yacht club one day, pulling a sailboat behind a 4 x 4, I asked them how they’d made their money. “Batteries,” was the reply.
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© 2004 - 2012 Toby Young