A Jen Too Many

There's been a discussion on one of my email lists about ways to spend less money on Christmas this year. It's the sort of topic that comes up every year, but this year the tone of the posts has been a little less casual, a little more intense.

One mother shared that, among other cost-cutting measures such as making wooden toys for the children, they are re-gifting some of the children's own toys to them. They are going to buy new batteries for old presents that haven't been played with in a while, wrap them, and let the kids open them on Christmas morning as new presents.

(If you are reading this, S., you know where I'm going.)

My parents did something like that once. Once.

It's one of those ignominious family stories, the kind they hate to have us retell. The kind that elicit mingled groans and laughter from everyone, and the question, "What were you thinking?"

One year for, I believe, Christmas, my little brother S. got a Lite Brite. He and I both* were ecstatic about this, and wanted to play with it constantly. And then the lightbulb burned out, and nobody bought another lightbulb and we couldn't play with it anymore, which was very disappointing. It was put away, and we forgot about it.

At some point the two of us ran across it again, still lacking a lightbulb. I was older, though, and I had a brilliant idea.** I knew where Mom kept the lightbulbs, so I got one out and put it in myself. We had so much fun playing with the Lite Brite again! Until we tried to pull the pegs back out.

Yep. Plastic designed to handle a low watt bulb doesn't handle a 60 watt bulb so well. The pegs and the black pegboard they fit into melded into a near solid mass on the side nearest the lightbulb.

And that was that. The end of the Lite Brite. No-one was very happy with me, including myself.

I don't know when the second Christmas was. In the time distortion of childhood memories it seems like it was several years later, but it might have been just a few months later. (It can't have been all that long, though, because both events happened in the same house, which we were only in for four years.) My dad was trying to get a business of his own off the ground, and things weren't going so well. There had been a great demand for his product when he started, but now demand had tapered off dramatically and our finances had gotten very tight.

As a parent, one who has known a tight Christmas or two myself, I can sympathize with them. As a child, I was appalled, though not nearly as upset as my brother was when he opened a fascinatingly large box to see his old Lite Brite, refurbished, with a new pegboard, new pegs, and new lightbulb.

Our parents, poor things, didn't get quite the reaction they were hoping for.
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*Our younger siblings are much younger than us, so it was still just the two of us at that point.

**I had a lot of brilliant ideas back then. Most of them weren't all that brilliant. Unfortunately, I didn't ever realize that until I was halfway into implementing the idea. That was generally when the unrealized, but very fatal, flaws would come to light.***

***This is why I went around with a large shock of hair sticking straight up from the top of my head for several weeks in 6th grade. It turned out that it wasn't such a great idea to try to deal with tangles and knots by cutting them out. Scissors just don't make a good replacement for hairbrushes.