Wednesday, November 30, 2022

Toys, money, sun, girls...

"Six months later, one of his house-inflected children’s songs – inspired, he said, by Belgian nightclubs – was still tormenting me: 'All I see are colours, colours all around. All I see are colours, colours when I bounce. BOUNCE!'"

~ Alex Blasdell

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/nov/24/have-toys-got-too-brainy-how-playthings-became-teaching-aids-young-children

“'They’ve got all the money in this booming industrial town, and one year they got a dollhouse,' Bensch continued, evoking a snowy New England yuletide from a bygone era. “But in ensuing years, they would get an orange, a book, a piece of dollhouse furniture. They didn’t get the whole onslaught of goods that any child expects to receive for birthdays and holidays today – or that a parent thinks, ‘I’m being delinquent if I don’t give them everything under the sun.’

There was something jewel-like in the beauty and simplicity of this story: a single dollhouse, in an uncluttered room, cherished and filled, wardrobe by tiny painted wardrobe, over the course of many years. I wanted for my son some of the frugality, some of the quietude, that must have been shared by those two girls. 

But then again, they grew up in another world." 

~ A. B. 

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