Holidays are upon us

The holiday season has begun, or so the Today Show reports, since this day is apparently the start of the travel weekend. The city hasn't dressed itself up for its role as the most romantic place to be during the holidays. Rockefeller's humongous tree will be lit next weekend with festivities taking place before the big moment when someone, some celebrity, will switch on the thousands of lights. Lord and Taylor's windows are already a glow, readying itself for a bleak shopping season by all the analyst reports. The retailers are hoping all the Europeans will come to New York for a shopping extravaganza, if only JFK weren't the world's worst airport and delays surely to be one of the worst of the year.

For our family we started a tradition, of sorts, a few years ago with our son. Instead of making our young child put pen to paper, creating a shopping list for Santa, we encouraged him, or he took it upon himself, to take the endless flurry of catalogs from toy companies and circle items that took his fancy. When he was three, the circles were challenging enough since his fine motor skills were in the nascent stage. But today, well, this has become a whole new endeavor for him.

They say kids adopt the behavior of their parents, whether consciously or unconsciously. For those families where parents read very little, if at all, it is pretty much guaranteed your children will not become big readers, no matter how much you encourage and threaten. Or worse, send them to the Sylvan Learning Center. And in truth, there is a bit of hypocrisy in parents imploring their little ones to read--because we know all the benefits of reading for educational, as well as soul enriching purposes--when they don't read a lick, other than the directions on some box.

If this is true, our children picking up our habits, then our little one is doing a bang up job of mimicking life in our household. He, like his parents, has a stack of books on his bedside table, along with his cup of water. The catalogs, collected during the pre-shopping season, is stacked along with a pen. It struck me, as I straightened his room, how similar his bedside table looked like ours.

Since he still believes in Santa Claus, and despite our cynicism, we haven't done anything to dispel his belief (I guess if we did, that would border on child abuse), it has been my job to snoop in his catalogs to see what it is he's circled as items his little heart covets. This anthropological study, of sorts, has been illuminating and hysterical. Since we hadn't set any parameters about what is acceptable, he has felt free to circle to his little heart's content. In each of the eight or so catalogs, he had circled some type of pirate ship. I suppose a pirate ship of one brand or another is bound to end up under the tree. There are the walkie talkie sets, which I know will be fun for one round of play, will end up broken and collectiong dust in the bottom of his endless toy bins. He circled the Harry Potter Legos thing, which is gargantuan and sure to bring about copious drinking for us after helping him put it together. Needless to say, that will not end up under the tree.

Despite my initial thought that the entire magazine would be circled, our son has been discriminating in his wants and desires. This is encouraging, if not a bit unsettling since he is a mere five years old. Somehow, despite his youth, he understood Santa, that most benevolent of characters, would know when a child was being gluttonous. Each day, taking a break from my work, I enter his room to gather the stack to see what more he circled before sleep overtook him. Each new item will mean another day for me, browsing the shelves at the Container Store, trying to figure out how to organize his stuff. His belief in the myth of Santa may only last this year--the day when he'll demand to know the veracity of what his friend had told him about Santa being made up. And with that demand will be the start of the slow unraveling of his childhood innocence.

In no time, I will be snooping in his room for other purposes, more serious, I'm sure. So, I enjoy this new break in my day when I can get inside my child's head, getting a peak into this little person. Some of what he circles sometimes gives me a glimpse, a very quick one, of the man he may become. Aside from chuckling at his grandiose plans to turn his room into a battleship, I also struggle with a sadness of how fleeting this time is for us all. It is usually to keep this sadness from settling into my chest that I sit down at my computer, not to work, but to shop online, ordering items that will, hopefully, bring about shouts of "that's so cool," from one little person--much beloved by his tired parents.