When it comes to Christmas toys, no one knows better than kids. So I asked my son to share his thoughts on that crack-of-dawn, paper-strewn holiday morning—a late December answer, in miniature, to Pamplona’s running of the bulls. “It’s so happy,” he yelled—for some reason, everyone in my family yells like carnival barkers, so please imagine all future dialogue at the volume of a Chicago Bears playoff game attended by a hundred thousand Mike Ditka clones, each six or seven beers in—“that you want to rip yourself open and nail yourself to the wall!”
At the end of the day, there are two types of parents in this world: Those who will get into a Yuletide, barroom-style mall brawl over a Cabbage Patch Kid, and those who will not. Thus far, I have fallen into the latter category. I would congratulate myself for this, but I do all my shopping online, where the only barroom-style brawls reside deep in the wilds of the comment sections.
When applied to toy shopping, my son’s Christmas metaphor—you know, the one about ripping yourself open and nailing yourself to the wall—becomes doubly brilliant. That’s because these days, shopping is a contact sport. It’s just not Christmas without a good old-fashioned melee in the toy section of a Walmart. It seems almost normal now, but you have to remember that it has not always been thus.
Let’s go back to the glory days of 1983. Ronald Reagan was president, A Christmas Story had just debuted in theaters, and I was a six-year-old desperately attempting to outgrow a disastrous preschool bowl cut. As a child I wasn’t terribly interested in dolls, except for Barbie and my Wonder Woman action figure. Both, it should be noted, were bodacious, dramatic, and glamorous creatures. Both also happened to sport, as my sharp-eyed yet anatomically challenged older brother noticed, a pair of “nice elbows.”
Ahem.
Enter the Cabbage Patch Kid, 1983’s mysterious “it toy” that was not bodacious, dramatic, or glamorous. In fact, it was so mushy-bodied that it lacked visible elbows of any kind. Cabbage Patch Kids were an odd conglomeration of visual unease: the expectant, spooky eyes; the tucked-in, lipless, “Twilight Zone librarian” mouth; the spherical feet; the brazen tattoo.
Yes, in case you had forgotten, each “unique,” “adoptable” Cabbage Patch Kid personally ensured that you would never forget its creator, the mad genius Xavier Roberts, because his name was literally stamped on the rear end of every single Cabbage Patch Kid in existence. At the time, this detail seemed charming. In retrospect, it was really, really weird.
No one really knows how Cabbage Patch Kids took off, selling millions and millions of dolls—over 100 million to date. Like historians debating the European powder keg of 1914, most veterans of the great Cabbage Patch Conflict of ’83 are still confused as to what the fighting was really about.
“They don’t walk, they don’t talk, wet their pants, or grow hair,” a reporter for New York’s WPIX-TV intoned in December of that fateful year, covering the Cabbage Patch madness. “They don’t do much of anything. But they have upset the supply and demand cycle to an astonishing degree.” That was a rather genteel way of putting things, given that the segment led off with footage from the infamous 1983 Cabbage Patch smackdown in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. If you’re not familiar with this particular moment in American history, it culminated in a shirt-sleeved store manager warding off crazed parents with an aluminum baseball bat: a striking, real-life homage to pretty much every zombie apocalypse movie ever made.
“Most buyers can’t express why this doll is so popular this year, and others can’t explain why they want to buy it,” the reporter continued. The camera then cuts to an older woman with a thick New Jersey accent, desperately searching for a doll from the Patch. “I don’t like them!” she shouts. “I don’t like them! I don’t like their faces!”—here she pauses, shaking her head as if to rid her mind of the smiling, floating doll faces—“But I want one!”
And so, it seemed, did everyone else. Despite my lukewarm stance on nonbodacious dolls, I happily received a Cabbage Patch Kid that Christmas. (It was procured via good fortune from the wait list, not by blood sport, because that’s how we did things in my corner of southwestern Michigan, where being raised properly meant coming out at least slightly repressed.) She came with the name Evangeline Joy; I was strangely thrilled, despite myself, to fill out the “adoption” papers. I would even go in for one more strange-faced interloper before the craze died down: a boy this time, clothed in a marketing-savvy Detroit Tigers uniform, whom I quickly renamed after second baseman “Sweet Lou” Whitaker.
By the time the next huge, rip-yourself-open, nail-yourself-to-the-wall Christmas toy came around—that would be Tickle Me Elmo, in 1996—I was safely ensconced in college.
When I say “safely,” I’m being literal. Elmo, at least the ticklish, stuffed version, was a mysterious, terrifying, cosmic trigger, filling the nation, as People magazine reported, with a kind of barbarian “blood lust.” While the previous year’s Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers craze sent Christmas shoppers into a largely peaceful frenzy, Elmo was a beast of a different number.
In Chicago, two moms were sent to the clink over an Elmo-related scuffle; in Canada, an unsuspecting Walmart clerk almost met his doom when three hundred customers stampeded at the sight of the Elmo he held, apparently provoked by the splash of brilliant red. The clerk, Robert Waller, suffered a broken rib, a concussion, and a final knockout blow from a white Adidas shoe. “I was pulled under, trampled—the crotch was yanked out of my brand-new jeans,” he told the press. Yowza.
Clearly, the raw energy fueling the search for the perfect Christmas toy is something to behold. As the sands of time sift forward, the “it” toys of Christmas will continue to come and go—a Furby here, a Zhu Zhu Pet there, an Optimus Prime Transformer in the corner—leaving both joy and havoc in their wake. What can we make of it all? Better yet, what should we make of it all?
Much could be said about consumerism, or loss of perspective, or the army of whimsical, floating Elmo faces that will eternally haunt our dreams. But there’s also the spirit of Christmas here, if you look hard and close enough: Most parents, it turns out, desperately, fiercely, and helplessly love their children. They want to give their children good gifts. Along the way, some just get roped into taking a ride with the wrong sort of reindeer. Who may or may not be drunk.
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To read more from Heather and other great conservative writers on the wonder of Christmas, purchase a copy of The Christmas Virtues at Templeton Press, Amazon, or Barnes & Noble. The Christmas Virtues is a humorous companion for, and guide to, navigating the trials and tribulations of the holiday season. It’s a reminder of how we can embrace the joy, hope, and love of Christmas—of the real Christmas. And a call for us to stand up for Christmas, because America needs is now, more than ever.
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