Monday, March 23, 2015

It's Your Special Day!

Last Tuesday, my six year old son, Ronin, sprung out of bed with an uncharacteristic amount of energy at 6:30 in the morning.

“Come on Quentin! Let’s see if our toilet is green!”

He ran off down the hallway with his three year old brother in tow while my wife and I were left staring at each other with a look that could only be described as pure bewilderment.

“It’s not green! He didn’t visit us”, my son said with pure dejection in his voice.  I asked him who he was talking about and his reply was one that my sleep-deprived brain should have seen coming from a mile away – “the leprechaun! It’s St. Patrick’s Day!”

Good grief.

It would seem that somewhere along the line, my son was told that a leprechaun visits your house the night before St. Patrick’s Day, uses your facilities (hence the green water), causes some mischief, and leaves some treats around the house for your troubles. Being the quick thinking Dad of action that I am, I went downstairs to check my bathroom and found that, indeed, the water in my toilet was green –oddly, almost the same shade of lemon lime Mio water flavoring - and the room had been toilet papered by a mischievous (not so) wee man.  We couldn’t find any chocolate treats strewn about the house, though, but I assured the kids that they would likely be found when we returned home from our respective days outside the home.

These March 17 visits are, apparently, a regular occurrence in many houses every year – with some going as far as building leprechaun traps in the hopes of catching the little tricksters. Kids that have these visits every year, of course, tell my children that they should be expecting the very same thing! Either the leprechaun shows up, or I have a couple of pretty dejected kids. That’s just wonderful.

I have one question I’d like to ask; when did every single day on the calendar get some sort of overblown celebration attached to it? When I was a kid – a full blooded Irish one at that – we celebrated by dressing in green when we went to school. As I got older, we still wore the green but maybe had a shot or two of Jameson Irish Whiskey while singing ‘Danny Boy’ to mark the occasion. This Leprechaun thing is brand new to me and as someone who prides myself on my expertise with children’s tales, this completely blindsided me.

With two young children, my house gets more traffic than Magnetic Hill in the summertime when it comes to visitors. Santa Claus, The Easter Bunny and The Tooth Fairy all drop by at different points during the year. I thought that was the standard and more than enough. My kids tell me there’s a boogeyman, but I’ve never seen him – and the Sandman shows up every night, although often much later than I would like. 


Now on top of this leprechaun business, some people tell me there’s a New Year’s Fairy that visits some homes to bring a toy to good girls and boys on the morning of January 1 - after all the loot Santa drops off just a week before.  Are you kidding me?  Then there’s that creepy ‘Elf on the Shelf’ that some people have too, but that thing looks like it should be in a police lineup; not sitting on my mantel.  What’s next – the Black Friday Bear who drops mall gift cards down your chimney?

I get it, folks. People want to celebrate their kids. I do too, and there are special things I do for my boys – like always building a Lego set with my son at the end of the first day of school. The difference is, though, that I don’t tell him that the Lego Elf delivered a new set for us, only to have him start school in September and ask other kids why the Lego Elf didn’t visit their house. 

Do you see where I’m going with this?

We’re creating a world for our kids now where we seem to be trying to make every single holiday, observance or Tuesday ‘ super duper special’.  The word ‘special’, by definition, means something that is better or greater than the norm.  I think we’re getting dangerously close to turning special days into the pedestrian.  At this rate, in order to get our little guys and gals excited about something in the future we’re almost going to have to trot out a pony or a new bike every week because we’re raising the stakes so high.

Am I wrong?  Maybe I’m just an old curmudgeon who is only a few years away from repeating the story my Granddad used to tell of how he was lucky to get “an orange in a sock and one wind-up toy” at Christmas, and how we didn’t know how lucky we were to be getting all the fancy new doodads every year. Perhaps excess is the new norm and I’m losing touch?

I wonder what this will do to our children’s sense of entitlement in the future?

I know one thing – keeping up with the Joneses never used to mean scrambling home before my family at 5 o’clock to make sure the ‘leprechaun’ had dropped off some chocolate gold coins.  At least he left some for me… it wasn’t all bad.

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