MLP Christmas

I'm not sure what it is in being a parent that would make you wait in line for a Cabbage Patch Kid for 20 hours. Or pay $70 online for a Zhu Zhu pet. I've thought people were totally nuts to get in fights over beanie babies, or to go to Black Friday at 12:01 am after Thanksgiving. But whatever it is, I've caught it.

I know what it is, actually, so I shouldn't judge. It's the desire, no matter how off-base, no matter how displaced, to see your kids happy. To give them what they really want, even if it is a battery-powered hamster who makes cow noises. To make some of that magic real, that magic that says "maybe there is a Santa Claus!" Anyway, I never understood until this year: the year of the My Little Ponies.

This is how I will remember this year. In early December I decided that I didn't want to shop, at a mall or online, for their toys. So I looked on craigslist. It took me a few days but I finally found it. Helena has been known to say in her little 4-and-a-half-year-old voice "I love anything ponies," so I looked and looked and there it was one day: "Lot of My Little Ponies, 25 in all." I emailed the woman selling, she emailed back that she would take $15 for them and throw in some extras, and I bought My Little Ponies, for about 60 cents a piece.

But when I opened the bag I realized that plastic Pony hair doesn't hold up well to playing. Their hair was a little matted, a little tattered. And that's when I caught it: the parental Christmas fever. That little switch turned on inside of me and I spent the rest of the month, day by day, doing something I never would have imagined I'd do: washing and blow-drying the hair of 25 My Little Ponies. That's right, I'll admit it. Blowing it dry with a round brush, if you must know, as I would do to my own hair.

Also, it was more like 35 MLPs, as my mom has come to refer to them.

It's actually worse than you'd imagine. One night I was taking a bath and I thought, might as well do some ponies while I'm in here. Picture the look on my husband's face as he came to get ready for bed and there I was, sitting in the bathtub, washing the MLPs. Needless to say he was a little worried about me this month, but it all came full-circle when I gave him the bag of about 300 blocks that I bought for Lilly on craigslist and he spent perhaps one hour on the floor of the living room, Christmas Eve, "setting them up" (AKA playing with them).

It was worth it. Christmas morning the kids were just blown away. Hardly anything short of a new pool could equal the visual impact of 35 My Little Ponies playing and frolicking around the living room. Was it a little crazy? Sure. Shouldn't Christmas be a little crazy? I'm not talking "stress out" crazy, but just a little nuts. A little magical.

Besides, you should have seen their hair. Magic!