I suppose childhood can be characterized as a process of sorting out misconceptions from reality – the misconceptions can either by foisted upon you inadvertently by adults, or intentionally by perpetuating cultural icons or mores (think Santa, Easter bunny or tooth fairy here), or self imposed. Emerging maturity then is represented by a series of AHA! moments when the status quo is challenged and a distinct personal reality emerges.
One of my favorite childhood misconceptions was my literal interpretation of daylight savings time. As an 8 year old, I was a bit perplexed on how to save daylight, but wanting to contribute to the project, I would go outside with a jar, put daylight in it and then screw the top on tightly and store it in my closet. I don’t recall when I realized that Santa Claus was a phony, but I do remember, with some regret, cruelly educating a wide-eyed child. I was skiing with my next door neighbor Nell in Utah, around 1964, and we happened to be thrown together in ski class with the family of Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense. His family was presented as the elite, and I remember being among those watching McNamara in hushed awe as he
whizzed down the ski slopes in baggy ski pants. Somehow I became jealous of his children who had a famous father and an apparently gilded life, so one day in the cafeteria line, I told the youngest child, probably around 6 years old, “You know there is no such thing as Santa Claus!” and then was filled with immediate remorse as her eyes filled with tears. The next two days were spent in terror as I feared that McNamara was going to confront me for spoiling his child’s vacation, but it turns out that he had other things on his mind.
As parents ourselves, we perpetuated the Santa Claus scenario with our children, but one year I drew the line at the Easter Bunny, since I did not want to bring any more candy or kiddy crap into the house. My plan was simple, we were not church goers, so I just didn’t mention Easter at all to the kids, and it was only several weeks later that my son said, “Hey what happened to the Easter bunny this year?” Another time I tried to create a mythical creature – the “Hang Nail Fairy.” I was playing on a woman’s softball team, where everyone showed up with their young children. When our team took the field, any left over players were basically assigned the chore of babysitting maybe ten or twelve kids at once. Since our team was only marginally talented, it could take a good while to get three outs and have all the mothers return to the sidelines to tend to their children. I was the designated babysitter for one inning of barely controlled chaos. One nameless little girl somehow got her hand caught in the chain link fence as she screamed for her mother in right field. As I tried to unwrap her tense grip, I saw that she had a nasty looking bloody hang nail. When the universal antidote of a cup of apple juice didn’t quiet her sobs, I tried a more mercenary approach. I explained to her that having a hang nail was actually a good thing, because when she got home, her mother could cut it off and put it under her pillow, and in the night the hang nail fairy would come and leave some money, and probably a lot, since blood was involved.
Her sobbing quieted a little bit, but then she looked at me and said, “Hey, how come I have never heard of the hang nail fairy before?”
Thinking quickly I said, “Do you live in Winnetka? I live in Lake Forest, and the hang nail fairy always comes to our suburb, but maybe Winnetka is just not on his route.”
The combination of the possibility of a pay off, plus a subtle disturb point that Winnetka was somehow inferior to Lake Forest gave her enough to think about and she sat quietly on the bench. I tried to make myself scarce as her mother finally trotted in from right field.
Barbies, GI Joes and handguns were accepted cultural icons that were part of my childhood and that I totally rejected as a parent. Barbie for obvious reasons, and also because I was irked that Barbies were considerably more expensive than the male equivalent – GI Joes. My mother had blithely bought my younger brothers GI Joes and then very realistic looking handguns, a left over from the popular 1960s TV series Bonanza and Gunsmoke, where a holster was an everyday accessory. I tried to convince my mother that these were unacceptable toys, but my mother pointed out that a weapon was a weapon, and if it wasn’t a gun it would be a spear, a stick, a club, and that fighting (and presumably killing) had always been a part young boys childhood. Yes but… The GI Joes I tried to position as “dolls,” i.e. you don’t want your sons playing with dolls, but she repurposed the Joes as “action figures.” Yes but … Basically, my mother was going with the flow on this one, and while she was happy enough that I did not want to play with Barbies, it might be seen as a bit weird and sissyish if the boys didn’t have some guns to play with.
My most recent AHA! moment about childhood misconceptions came just the other day as I took a critical look at Mr. Potato Head for the first time, and thought, “what was everyone thinking, how has this creature become a cultural icon for the past three generations?” It is quite frankly repulsive, a plastic globoid figure that bears only a faint resemblance to a potato, where the head and torso are rolled into one, with arms extending from just below the ears and the feet seem to sprout from
the chin, or maybe it’s the butt, but regardless there do not appear to be any legs. Presumably the body parts had to be a certain size to avoid being considered a choking hazard, but the resulting oversized pieces make the eyes totally bugged out, the nose a bumptious red and the lips suffering from a collagen OD.
Mr. PH started innocuously enough in the early 1950s as a collection of facial features that you used with a real potato – BYOP. However, in the era of post war frugality, mothers did not want to waste a real potato on a toy, and there was also the risk that a moldering potato could be left beneath a bed or couch. The plastic potato emerged in the 1960s and the product really took off – God knows why, since now the toy was far removed from sweet simplicity of the real life potato, and children could easily experiment with ripping the eyes from their creature, or making a pathetically deformed humanoid figure that could be ridiculed. In the 1980’s the potato came equipped with a compartment in its head/butt where you could store the loose parts. While certainly a convenience for parents, I would think that this would be a major source of confusion – you can put your eyes in your butt? This seems to confirm one of Nick’s childhood misconceptions in which he thought that that the butt was essentially a storage place for pooh until you had to go to the bathroom.
Mr. Potato Head came to life in the 1998 movie Toy Story, where the creators gave him a sarcastic personality voiced by the equally sarcastic Don Rickles. At one point of particular peevishness, Mr. Potato Head whips off his lips and basically kisses his ass. In the DVD extras, the creators stated that Mr. PH’s crabbiness could be easily explained by the frustration of having your facial features removed or rearranged at will. 
Hasbro is the manufacturer of Mr. Potato Head under its PlaySkool banner. PlaySkool toys are designed to be educational, which is in sharp contrast to the misspelling of School, far more egregious than when Dan Quayle misspelled “potatoe.” According to its website, Mr. Potato Head offers multiple different educational opportunities (seemingly limited to boys based on the use of the pronoun “he”):
- Basic body concepts: “Being able to identify body parts can … allow your child to tell you what hurts when he is not feeling well.”
Imagination: “Would Mr. Potato Head still be able to kiss Mrs. Potato Head if he had an ear where this mouth used to be?”
Problem solving: “Today he might just be deciding where Mr. Potato Head’s nose should go, but someday he might be dreaming up new energy sources or designing a new airplane!”
Fine Motor Skill: “As your child picks up Mr. Potato Head’s goofy glasses and pushes them onto his eyes (or his ears, or nose or mouth or feet), he’s developing and refining his finger movements.”
Hand-eye Coordination: “In order to properly line up each plastic piece and push it into Mr. Potato Head’s plastic frame, your child needs his hands and eyes to work together. Good hand-eye coordination is a critical foundation skill that necessary for success in all kinds of activities, from doing simple puzzles to throwing and catching balls.”
Control of Muscle Strength: “As your child picks up Mr. Potato Head’s big bulbous nose and pushes it into his spud bud’s ear, he’s figuring out how much force he needs to get the nose to go in and make it stay there. Good control of muscle strength may help children know how much force to use to … pat their pet.”
PlaySkool would like us to believe that Mr. Potato Head is a key gateway toy for future rocket scientists, athletes or other critical thinkers, but basically, what we are dealing with here is an pretty simple toy that somehow got established as a bizarre cultural icon. Then PlaySkool repurposed Mr. PH as an educational tools to meet the new cultural expectation that toys are self-improvement tools. In my view, these efforts are nothing more than putting lipstick on a pig. I also hope that the “muscle strength” lessons of Mr. Potato Head are not extrapolated to pets as children try to rip the nose off the family cat or dog.
Perhaps I should not be so hard on Mr. Potato Head. He does have some advantages. Hasbro never had to grapple with such thorny issues as culturally sensitive toys, i.e how black to make a Barbie. Mr. PH transcended cultures and what’s more he was already dark-skinned. In the 1970s the American Cancer Society was looking for a celebrity spokes person for the Great American Smokeout, where smokers were encouraged to give up smoking for at least one day. Mr. Potato Head effortlessly went cold turkey when his traditional pipe was simply deleted from the kit. The Cancer Society could not have found a more reliable spokespud. Imagine if they had relied on Tiger Woods, for example, and had to deal with the fallout of reports of Tiger secretly smoking all over the country.
The missing words in the following poems are all anagrams (like spot, stop, post) and the number of dashes indicate the number of letters. One of the anagrams will rhyme with either the preceding or following line. Your job is to solve the missing words based on the context of the poem. Scroll down for the answers.
Over the generations, think of the inexplicable cultural icons we have acquired,
Perhaps its time for some of these —— cows to be retired.
The Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy or Mr. Potato Head all grotesque and wide eyed.
Or Maybe even Santa Claus with —— of elves working at his side.
Every year we take these icons, rev up the engines and give the kids quite a show,
But cultural icons will persist if we are too —— to challenge the status quo.
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
Answers: sacred, cadres, scared
Follow Liza Blue on:
Share:
