North Star Writers Group

Every year about this time - as my wife Sally gears up to begin her Christmas shopping - I get the inexplicable urge to shop the toy stores of America.

It’s dumb, of course, because all of my kids are too old to want playthings for Christmas.

“How’d you like a nice toy truck from Santa Claus?” I asked my oldest son the other day.

“Not much,” said Bob, who’s 42 and living in Pittsburgh.

The other kids - Laurie, Jackie and Christopher - are the same way.

They want gift certificates, clothes and money - not toys - for Christmas.

But the truth is, I miss being able to shop for trucks, dolls and other playthings. It’s sad how quickly children grow up.

I mean, it seems like just yesterday my wife Sally and I bought Laurie one of those little ovens that worked with a light bulb and Jackie a doll that did everything but run away from home.

And I’ll never forget the year Santa brought Christopher a BB gun despite numerous admonishments from Sally that he surely would shoot his eye out.

Oh, time, you robber you, what have you done to my children?

I mean, Christmas isn’t stone-washed blue jeans, CDs or $50 bottles of perfume.

Christmas is roller skates, teddy bears and little red wagons.

I admit it. I envy the mothers and fathers who are shopping for toys this Christmas.

Can you keep a secret? Good. Then I’ll admit something else.

I still hang around toy stores, especially at Christmas.

Just the other day we went to the mall and when Sally headed for the clothing shops, I slipped quietly into the nearest toy emporium. First, I checked out the electric trains. Then I lingered awhile in the aisle where games of every description were stacked almost to the ceiling.
I eyeballed the model airplanes, too, and the tea sets and jump ropes and doll clothes and kites and plastic fire engines. Then, as I was getting ready to leave, I heard a man and his wife talking.

“I can’t wait until the kids are old enough so we don’t have to go through this toy-buying every Christmas,” she complained.

“I hear that,” he agreed.

They were wrong, of course.

But I didn’t have the heart to take them aside, say over by the doll houses, or maybe the electric football games, and tell them to enjoy their forays into toyland while they could because soon — too soon, in fact — their kids would be asking for socks, shirts and sweaters instead of bicycles, coloring books and baseball gloves.

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This is Column # BB39. Request permission to publish here.