The kid had her 9th birthday party this weekend. And after all the planning and preparation and fretting, I came out the other side with one solid, indisputable epiphany:
Children’s party gift bags are of the devil. And we parents need to collectively rise up as one against the pointless expense and scourge of crap this convention entails and STOP THE FUCKING INSANITY ALREADY.
Parents, you know what I’m talking out. Here are some of the delightful baubles you’ll immediately recognize as items you might expect your kid to cart home from birthday parties several times a year, thereby accumulating a giant stash of cheap, useless junk in your home that you then have to fight with them to (inevitably) dispose of:
Ooh! Kazoos! SO NOT TOTALLY ANNOYING AT ALL!
Tops! Because maybe your kid wants to be all olde time-y and shit!
Yeah, fuck the DS and the Kinect, let’s get our tops on, man!
Pens shaped like various things! In this case, syringes! Completely appropriate!
Flashing LED rings! Seizureific!
Seriously, who decided THIS was a good idea? Who decided that kids who go to a birthday party need or deserve presents of their own? Back in the Paleolithic Era when I was a kid, what you got for going to another kid’s birthday party was GETTING TO GO TO A FREAKING BIRTHDAY PARTY. Period and the end. That was incentive enough. Because typically there was cake and cookies and candy and snacks and games and a maybe a movie or some putt-putt golf or something. And WHEE! OH, THE FUN! The idea that someone would give ME something to go to a party would have seemed beyond ridiculous. Asinine, even. Why? BECAUSE IT IS.
I suppose some parents would argue that party gift bags are a good thing because they soften the blow of having to watch another child receive and open scads of presents for the non-birthday-having kids in attendance at a party. To which I say: OH, HORSESHIT. First, kids typically don’t get those bags until the very end of the party, after all the present-opening has taken place, so their potential impact on anyone’s behavior during the party is debatable at best. Second – and most importantly – if your kid can’t deal with watching another kid open presents, maybe your kid just doesn’t deserve to go to a birthday party. Seriously. If your child needs to be given things in order to secure passable behavior from them at a freaking birthday party – where attendees are doing nothing but eating cake and stuffing their faces full of Doritos and shit while being entertained by a magician named The Amazing Tim (or whatever) – then your kid is just being a manipulative asshole. And maybe you need to do some actual parenting to combat that, and not just throw cheap plastic shiny things at the problem.
So can we get a petition started or something? Can we stop training our kids to be mercenary and self-centered, always expecting to get something for themselves just because another kid is getting something, always assuming that when they give a gift they will get a gift in return? Can we, as parents, agree to stop doing this to each other, and to our kids? I’m asking seriously. Because I for one am up to my eyeballs in novelty erasers and strings of Mardi Gras beads and tiny little bottles of bubble soap shaped like farm animals. God fucking dammit.
