If you’re caught up in the Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Super Sunday, Giving Tuesday, Small Business Saturday, and Holy S*#% Is It January Yet of the season, you’re hardly alone.
Hot Toy lists, sales, coupons, pre-dawn lines, and shopping frenzy are totally the norm. Leather jackets for an elf who has to creepily spy on your kids so they’ll be good so you can go into more credit card debt in order to inundate them with crap they’ll forget about in 48 hours are now firmly a way of life. Yippee?
And then something comes along and you remember, “Oh, yeah. There’s supposed to be some meaning to this time of the year beyond all the material stuff. Like teaching our kids that it’s not just about getting, but making the most with what you have, which is way more than a lot of others have.”
That something came along recently when a Redditor posted some old-school Lego instructions from the ’70s:
To parents
The urge to create is equally strong in all children. Boys and girls. It’s imagination that counts. Not skill. You build whatever comes into your head, the way you want it. A bed or a truck. A dolls house or a spaceship. A lot of boys like dolls houses. They’re more human than spaceships. A lot of girls prefer spaceships. They’re more exciting than doll houses. The most important thing is to put the right material in their hands and them create whatever appeals to them.
Whether or not the note is legitimate (LEGO says it is, according to I09, even if it’s still a bit suspicious given some questionable punctuation and typesetting), it’s nice to remember — particularly in the arguably grossest, most materialistic time of the holiday season — that sometimes we have an opportunity to put tools in our kid’s hands to let them use their imagination and simply create.
There’s much written about the further divide between gender-specific toys, not to mention how some girls toys are too girly and boys toys are pushing them to be increasingly violent. And then sometimes there are just LEGOs, where kids can build what they envision in their minds, and it has nothing to do with cutting Thanksgiving short to go stake out a place on a mile-long line for the privilege of trying not to get trampled en route to the aisle with the 50″ flat panel Smart TVs. Kids don’t always have the opportunity to just be themselves without being graded or judged. Wouldn’t it be nice if, during the holidays, they were gifted with some time and space to let them dream and play as they see fit?
Sometimes toys don’t have to be on a “Hot!” list to be cool. And sometimes all it takes is an old piece of paper to remind us that discovering something new is easier and more precious than we remembered.
Photo via Reddit