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snarpAs a kid my Christmukkah list was always stuff like dollhouses that resembled magic castles, huge erector sets, remote-controlled planes, and a horse. A real horse was always requested, and the resulting plastic ones accepted philosophically.
I now have an Amazon wishlist, which is the socially-accepted grown-up version of a Christmukkah list. As childhood gift lists expressed our aspirations as children, our Amazon wishlists express our desires as adults. Mine's incense, tea, cooking stuff, and a little butane stove for power outages.
The stuff I wanted as a kid represented to me, I guess, some combination of exploration/power/freedom/vengeance. (vengeance = zooming past the other kids on the horse like "haha!", or dumping stuff on them with the little plane) The adult stuff unsurprisingly suggests more anxiety - incense and emergency supplies are about control over your environment, and the tea and pressure cooker are, I guess, a combination of health-related worries and an identity-reification thing. Being particular about what you consume is how you know what sort of person you are, you know. It's in the adulthood manual.
The sort of imaginative play kids are engaging in when they make these lists sometimes shows up in adults' lists, too - hydroponics kits and night-vision goggles and guns are often part of a story people are telling about themselves. In my case, I guess, that stuff went more in the direction of writing fanfic about space vampire lesbians, and pondering the possibility of running for office on a platform that's just one long, anguished scream.
If confronted with a horse or huge erector set, I would probably sell the horse and give a kid I know the toys - as an adult, they don't serve as the magical gateways they did to kid-me. The toys would just sit there getting dusted occasionally. Dad's the one who wants a horse now, and I tell him he's not allowed until he starts taking better care of the pets he already has.
I now have an Amazon wishlist, which is the socially-accepted grown-up version of a Christmukkah list. As childhood gift lists expressed our aspirations as children, our Amazon wishlists express our desires as adults. Mine's incense, tea, cooking stuff, and a little butane stove for power outages.
The stuff I wanted as a kid represented to me, I guess, some combination of exploration/power/freedom/vengeance. (vengeance = zooming past the other kids on the horse like "haha!", or dumping stuff on them with the little plane) The adult stuff unsurprisingly suggests more anxiety - incense and emergency supplies are about control over your environment, and the tea and pressure cooker are, I guess, a combination of health-related worries and an identity-reification thing. Being particular about what you consume is how you know what sort of person you are, you know. It's in the adulthood manual.
The sort of imaginative play kids are engaging in when they make these lists sometimes shows up in adults' lists, too - hydroponics kits and night-vision goggles and guns are often part of a story people are telling about themselves. In my case, I guess, that stuff went more in the direction of writing fanfic about space vampire lesbians, and pondering the possibility of running for office on a platform that's just one long, anguished scream.
If confronted with a horse or huge erector set, I would probably sell the horse and give a kid I know the toys - as an adult, they don't serve as the magical gateways they did to kid-me. The toys would just sit there getting dusted occasionally. Dad's the one who wants a horse now, and I tell him he's not allowed until he starts taking better care of the pets he already has.
