Christmas recycling

I made notes for this post a month ago but never got around to finishing it.

The theme of Christmas this year seemed to be recycling (but less directly than for Jolly's 3rd birthday, in which the theme was literally recycling trucks).  Jolly's favorite Christmas present was not his present at all, but the recycled box from Guinevere's present (an electric blanket).  It had a cutout in the front (to allow the shopper to feel the soft velvety blanket texture), and Jolly decided that made it look just like a space helmet.  He was probably influenced heavily by the Rupert Bear story about the spaceship - in the story, there are rumors of a flying saucer, and Rupert's prankster friends decide to capitalize on this by making space suits out of cardboard and pretending to be spacemen.  (Later in the story we find out that there is a real spaceship, but it is so tiny Rupert needs to be hit with the shrinking ray before he can meet the aliens.)  Jolly's Grammy cut armholes in the box to make it an extra-good space helmet, and he spent much of the weeks after Christmas running around with the box on his head and declaring that he was a spaceman and the sofa (or entire house) was his spaceship.  We had to draw the line at sitting in laps for storytime with the helmet on, because it poked us uncomfortably.

Many of Jolly and Rip's other presents were recycled also, from their parents' childhood.  The best toys stand the test of time.  My mother brought some of my plastic dinosaurs.  I loved dinosaurs as a child, knew the names of all the different kinds, and had a very ample collection.  Possibly the best part was the large, hollow tyrannosaurus which could swallow the little dinosaurs and then vomit them back up again.  I thought this was hilarious as a child (actually, I still think it's pretty funny).  So far only the large dinosaurs have made it to our house (the whole collection would have been a bit much), but I suspect that more dinosaurs will show up in the future to be eaten by the tyrannosaurus.  Guinevere notes that she had some of the exact same dinosaurs in her childhood.  Also coming from Grammy's attic were some small toy trucks, which Rip thinks are the most fun ever.

Jolly and Rip's uncle, a musician, brought a glockenspiel (xylophone) from Guinevere's homestead.  It has keys that can be removed and replaced with flats and sharps for a custom instrument, although so far that has mostly resulted in keys having to be retrieved from the depths of the sofa.  It has a very pleasing sound, even when banged on by small children.

Two sets of grandparents independently sent dress-up clothing: some from the dress-up bin of Guinivere's childhood, and some scavenged (I assume) from closets/goodwill.  Our dress-up bin has gone from sparse to full!  The favorite item was a pirate hat, of which Jolly had been lamenting the lack shortly before Christmas.  He now spends nearly all non-spaceman time being a pirate.  He has decided that a wooden knife from his fruit-cutting set is his sword, and says that he is going to fight and "play fiercely."  (So it begins with the toy weapons - but it is inevitable, and I recall toy swords and guns being an integral part of my imaginative play as a child.  I still turned out to be a non-violent person in favor of gun control.)

I love that we can make the old new again by bringing back special toys we used to play with, instead of buying everything new.

One last note on the subject of recycling - we got a book from the library called "Dear Mr. Garbage Man," published in the 50s.  It is a about a garbage man who doesn't want to throw away things that might be useful to other people, so he saves most of what he picks up at the curb and invites all the people to come and take things they might need.  I thought this was going to be a very early ode to the benefits of recycling and the concept that one man's trash is another man's treasure, and I explained to Jolly how a long time ago there were no recycling trucks or internet message boards advertising free stuff, so people would throw useful things away and isn't it good that we don't do that anymore.  But, at the end of the book all the people decide that they things they took are really too broken to use, so they put them out with the garbage again, and the garbage man decides that isn't it great that they will be put in landfills so that parks and playgrounds can be built on top of what used to be swampland!  Then all his coworkers congratulate him on becoming a "real" garbage man.  The book went straight back to the library, and I marvel at how far our society has come in valuing recycling and the environment.