ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS IS AN OVERPRICED PILE OF FLUORESCENT PINK PLASTIC!
EXCLUSIVE: As the frantic festive toy scramble begins, a soupçon of sanity from LIBBY PURVES who’s been there, done that, and even bagged Thunderbirds Tracy Island
WE ALL want Christmas to fulfil our dreams and desires... however daft they may be. Yes, we’ll be delegating some of it to the Santa sack, but other things will be placed under that tree labelled with love from Mum or Dad (or stepmum, stepdad, two-dads, two-mums, Grandma, Nana, whoever).
They may be generic and sensible, like a bike or a scooter or a football, but new and fashionable gifts are not always that easy to get in any December, let alone one competing with Covid and its latest variant.
If the youngest has got his or her heart set on some over-hyped, cunningly branded, TV-pushed piece of plastic nonsense, we are drawn by our soft adult hearts to want to fulfil that yearning.
So small flares of panic always attach to the possibility that all the Ralleyz Warriors or the latest Disney or Bratz horrors will not arrive, or will sell out fast and leave little bottom lips trembling in disappointment at Christmas.
Yet, as for everything else, British phlegm and ingenuity will see us through. Autumn’s fuel worries have been resolved; the big meal itself is basically just a roast dinner; and sprouts are not compulsory.
And I foresee no major shortage of tinfoil to make stars and icicles.
There are enough old government circulars about Covid sculling around in most houses to be cut into strips and glued together in paper-chains, the way we did in the post-war years. So it’s easy for any cheerful soul to be festive.
But the nail-biting anxiety we are hearing most about concerns those must-have toys: the ones listed in those letters to Santa or heavy hints to kindly aunts and uncles.
I absolutely get this, having once queued outside Toys “R” Us on the Ipswich ring road from midnight to 3am in the hope of bagging a Thunderbirds Tracy Island set. It wasn’t even for my own child: I was standing a shift for my brother, on behalf of a younger nephew.
It was rather an uplifting experience because all the parents were laughing and giggling about how ridiculous it was to queue up for a fairly ghastly bit of fantasy plastic.
One chap who’d been there all evening had
been making notes on what people said and passed them on. He had several conversations with other fathers who opened their hearts in the dark cold drizzle to recall their own neglected or cruel childhoods and were damn well determined their own children should know how loved they were on Christmas morning.
SO THERE is always that irrational tug, that parental desire to attone, to make up for all the moments of short temper, the anxieties about school, and the days we were away at work, or the weary goodnights when we cut the bedtime story short.
Even without pandemics and supply-chain hiccups, there are always some toys threatened with shortages. Once it was Tracy Island; but in other years it has been Star Trek figures, Rubik’s Cubes, Sylvanian Families, Astronaut Barbie, Buzz Lightyear, Transformers, Furbies, Bob the (boring) Builder and innumerable screen games.
If it’s any comfort, the toy retailers and importers have a tense time too when Santa season approaches. It’s a business model that runs hot: a veteran once confessed to me, shaking his head at the memory: “I had to sit up drinking with a man all night once to get a consignment of Tressy dolls.” In our own child-rearing Christmases there was a pretty tense Boglin shortage, but we were at least quick off the mark in the year of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
These, for some reason, both children loved.We put on a great show of disapproving of them for being absurd, violent, cynically commercialised, and annoyingly named after great Renaissance artists (Michelangelo, Donatello, Leonardo and Raphael).
But curiously, on Christmas morning
Santa delivered two outfits. “Terrible old man!” we grumbled. “He pays no attention to parents!”
Part of the problem faced by all parents when children start nursery and primary school is peer pressure.
We only bought our eldest a couple of Transformers – military machines, cars, aircraft and the like, which folded out into robots – after at nearly four years old he said quietly in the back of the car that he would like to be “one of the Transformer boys” in the nursery.
Job done. But really we got away fairly lightly, and enjoyed all the Thomas the Tank Engine toys and the Duplo.
I suspect liberal, non-sexist parents of princessy girls suffer most. One young member of my extended family – no names – actually managed to get for Christmas the utmost horror, a “My Size Barbie”: a toddler-sized version of the weird stilettofooted monster, clad in various ultra-stretchy outfits which could be taken off and worn by the child herself.
Another family I know had the most tasteful, minimalist, designer green-and-silver Christmas decor in their allwhite living room and then, of course, found themselves staring miserably at a DayGlo scooter and a My Little Pony Dream Castle in garish pink.
There is no point in denying that to sophisticated adult eyes a lot of toys look plain horrible. In 2003, I sat on a toyjudging panel run by Hamleys – four adults, one of us being an industry figure, another a leading design critic and guru, plus two mums – me and then GMTV star Lorraine Kelly. The design expert was very refined: imagine a combination of Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen and the royal art collection spy Sir Anthony Blunt. We women pounced on each new toy saying things like, “Yay – that’s brilliant – how does it – ooh, look, his hat comes off!”
The industry chap peered at the plastic seams and evaluated how the production-line worked, and what the profit margin should be.
But whenever we mums happily got in touch with our inner child and crooned, “How brilliant, see here, Polly Pocket has magnetic feet, she can even stand on the ceiling!”, the design guru would close his eyes in real pain and murmur, “But it’s Heee-yidious! Hideous! Even as a child I wouldn’t put those colours together!”
That’s toy-world, in the age of mass production and mass hysteria marketing. And it may be that this Christmas some toys simply don’t turn up on the shelves early enough, or in large enough quantities, and others get stuck in a big ship in the Suez Canal.
BUT FEAR not. I took a long dreamvoyage back into my own childhood and recalled all the things I thought I desperately wanted, only a few of which I got. The Davy Crockett hat was a very important moment: I miss it still, with its cool fake raccoon tail. Then there was my rubber figure of Noddy’s friend Big Ears (I never liked Noddy himself. He was wet, with a silly bell on his hat. Big Ears, being a gnome, had an impressive beard and far better hat).
Just after Christmas I dropped that Big Ears toy between the stands at an outdoor cinema in Bangkok, where it couldn’t be got at. I am not quite over it yet.
But there are perennials – there will always be some form of soap-bubble gun, plenty of bouncing balls and yo-yos and crayons and paints and Twister mats and jokes.
And in my memory, the presents that stand out joyfully as the best were nearly always surprises.
The toy zither. The toy loom. The Victorian style jack-in-a-box which leapt out on me early on Christmas morning when I was six. The Pollock’s paper theatre.
Later, there was an educational “Le Petit Biologiste” set my dad found when we lived in France and I had idly said I fancied being a scientist.
I had my own microscope and slides, and could stare at insects close up and bring dirty bits of plant into the house. Once, with a 10-year-old school friend, I embarked on dissecting a dead earthworm. It wasn’t as cuddly as a Furby and didn’t bleep or shout, “To infinity and beyond!” like Buzz Lightyear. But it was one of the great presents.
Good luck, everyone, and be brave enough to surprise the children in your life…