On the Sixth Day of Christmas

The six geese a-laying, I am told, stand for the six days of Creation, before God rested. Meanwhile, I'm sitting here in my room, in a rocking chair by the open door, listening to a conversation upstairs in which Crispina is trying to work out the family tree of the little doll she bought yesterday with her very own money, a plastic infant infused with the scent of roses. This is a little bizarre, I think, but the doll does smell nice.

Crispina to Helier:  . . . and Epiphany's husband will be Uncle Somebody, and you're Uncle Helier . . .

Helier to Crispina:  I'm trying to read.

Nothing like babies to turn a young man to the improvement of his mind by much reading. Unless it's area rugs. In my experience, area rugs raise all kinds of theological questions crying out to be answered by serious research in a library far, far away.

I'm only halfway through my first cup of coffee, and still on vacation -- the Octave of Christmas is a long, long seventh day -- so if you were expecting coherence, you might wish to seek it elsewhere.

Anyway.

We went to Wal-Mart yesterday, because in this town you cain't hardly not go to Wal-Mart. It's what you do when you want to get out of the house. The Main Street businesses stay closed -- on Monday, at least, a beautiful stillness reigned on the courthouse square, and I think the Good Neighbor Shop is shut all week -- but at Wal-Mart there is no Octave, no season at all other than a market awareness of  shifts in demand, and anyway, the kids got gift cards for Christmas which they were burning to use.

Crispina couldn't find her gift card so had to raid her piggy bank, which contained, rather to my surprise, nine dollars and forty cents. The gift card was for ten dollars, so she didn't come out too badly. I suggested, in fact, that she might take less than nine dollars and forty cents with her to the store, so that this Cash in Search of Something to Be Spent On impulse didn't burn up everything she had, but nothing doing. She loaded all her money into one of those little plastic-net bags that chocolate coins come in, and off we went.

Shopping with children requires an enormity of patience and discretion, neither of which I naturally have in spades. When Epiphany and Amicus were little and we lived in England, I used to take them down the road to a magical shop run by a German lady, full of every kind of exquisite natural-wood Waldorfy toy imaginable. Many of the toys were insanely expensive, but there was always something -- a little  boat powered by a balloon, for instance -- that a child could buy with the random coins jangling in his or her pocket, and while it was cheap and maybe didn't last terribly long, it was never quite junk. It was wonderful to walk into this shop;  it was even not quite torture to spend two hours in this shop with a child who had to finger everything over forty-seven times and be told, "No, that costs ninety-two pounds, and you have three pounds thirty-eight pence."

The lady, behind her counter, was kind and helpful, occasionally pointing out shelves of things within the child's price range. She was also beautiful, sort of agelessly middle-aged as I (ahem) am now, I'm sure, with masses of golden curls and a look of serenity which I think must have come in the box with all the Waldorf stuff. Her shop occupied the same block as a vegetarian grocery with naturopathic clinics upstairs where you could go to have an aromatherapy massage or be adjusted by an osteopath. Anyway, she fit right in. We liked to go and visit her, and as I say, the shop itself was like something out of a fairy tale. You walked around long enough, and eventually some enchanted shelf would proffer you exactly what you wanted.

Not . . . so . . . Wal-Mart. Do I even need to say that? Anyway, there we were. The older kids went off to wander, as they told me, while Crispina and I walked up and down the aisles, up and down the aisles, past baby dolls which laughed at us or mimicked crawling or, when punched in the stomach, sneezed and said they were stuffy, Mommy. All of them cost more than nine dollars and forty cents, for which I am still thankful. I dislike toys that do things for you, especially when the things are noisy and repetitive;  on the other hand, it wasn't my money. I was there in merely an advisory capacity.

We looked at ugly computer-generated-looking animal toys. Cheap, but nah. We walked down the Barbie aisle. There was a whole shelf of five-dollar Barbies, fortunately high enough up that Crispina's eye wouldn't naturally have fallen on them. I don't loathe Barbie any more than I loathe sneezing baby dolls, and in fact the Barbies we do have have survived many years of rough living and been named things like Joseph and wrapped in toilet paper to be mummies -- the dead Egyptian kind, not the fancy-pink-carriage-pushing kind. In my experience, little girls notice Barbie's unnatural proportions far less than grown women do. In fact, they don't seem to think about them at all, which is why we've had Barbies play Saint Therese, for example. So I am not particularly anti-Barbie, but still. I wouldn't go out of my way to buy her, either.

Around and around we went:  Barbie, aaa-choo, hahaha, crawlcrawlcrawl. "How much is she? How much is she? How much is this? How much money do I have again?" Around and around and around.

I was on the verge of suggesting that we give up, that we save her money for another day, that simply having it didn't mean she had to spend it right then, that the right thing would come along in its time . . . when both of us, at once, saw this little baby doll by herself. I don't know where she came from;  we hadn't seen her in all our previous rounds of that aisle. There didn't seem to be any more like her. She was small, to be sure, but pretty enough that I really didn't think she'd cost less than ten dollars. We took her over to the scanner and swiped her bar code. Beeeeep. Five dollars. Sold, with money left over.

So, here she is, our plastic relative, scented with imitation attar-of-roses, in the bosom of our family, surrounded by Uncle Helier and the suggestion of Uncle Somebody-We-Probably-Haven't-Met-Yet. I'm not going to make too much of this, because experience tells me that this doll has roughly three days of primacy left. Maybe. She's had a bed made for her, been assigned a dresser, been clad in some other doll's rompers (all she was wearing to begin with was a diaper and hooded towel, not exactly warm in the frigid winter), named several times over, carried around in a makeshift sling fashioned from my old polarfleece scarf . . . and I've seen this happen to enough dolls already to know it won't last.

Ah, in fact, there's now a little drama being enacted upstairs, wherein one child wants very much to be in the room of another who does not require her company at this time, and has -- the first child, that is --  responded to my suggestion that she play with her baby doll by retorting, "I don't like baby dolls."

Such, as they say, is life. Make of it what you will, while I get dressed for Mass.


P.S. Though there are toys I like more than others, and toys I really don't like,  I've never been one to ban a kind of toy outright, or to tell other people that we don't allow x or y or z. And I can point to the exact reason why I don't do that. Years ago I was friends with a woman who had had six sons, most of whom were grown up already. She also had, at last, a little granddaughter. Once when she went to visit, she took the little granddaughter a doll -- all those years of boys, and finally, finally, she was able to buy a doll. You can imagine the time she spent.

So she arrived with this doll at her son's house, to be told, "Oh, we don't do gender-specific toys. Stuffed animals are fine, but we don't let her have dolls."

"I went out," my friend told me later, "and walked around the lake and cried."

In short, in my view, there are very, very, very few principles worth quite that much, especially when it's someone else's privilege to do the giving. Maybe this is a non-sequitur, but then again, maybe it's not.

PPS:  One of the most fun things the kids got for Christmas, by the way, among many, many fun things, was a very noisy game. Reality trumps most things, I find . . .