Flutterby™! : Good Afternoon

As an atheist raised with a lot of Jewish culture, with a bit of Methodist thrown in for good measure, I've never really been able to accept Christmas. This year, however, I realized something: Just as Christianity has appropriated the symbols of other traditions and rituals for its holidays, heck, they didn't even bother to change the name of Easter, so consumerism has appropriated symbols and rituals and from Christianity and other cultures and turned it into a celebration of consumption.

And I'm way more okay with that than I am with trying to convince myself, all evidence to the contrary, that it's about the birth of the messiah.

On another note, one of those traditions is the train around the tree. Around our tree it's my dad's old A.C. Gilbert American Flyer(none of that newfangled Lionel) S-gauge trains. These guys, amazingly, survived his childhood, and mine, and even stand up to the occasional toddling visitor we have here.

These are particularly apropos because A.C. Gilbert was "the man who saved Christmas", for reversing the opinion of the Council of National Defense in 1918 that parents should buy War Bonds rather than toys.

But what struck me as I was setting up the figure-8 that loops around the tree and a neighboring table leg or two was how toys have changed. There have always been war toys, so this isn't a screed against green plastic army men or die-cast tanks, but Charlene and I recently went into a Toys-R-Us and spent some time searching for Play Doh, and in the process searched through an amazing amount of action figures and the like. Where the children of my dad's era and before were inundated with toys of construction and transportation, I believe kids these days get a much higher ratio of figures of combat and fighting to those of creation and commerce.