Monday Musing: PLASTI-CHRISTMAS-CRAP

Does everyone feel this queasy when holiday shopping? I am sitting here at midnight, the veritable dawn of CyberMonday, preparing to fill my online shopping cart with items for my kids, anxious to get the major chunk of my Christmas shopping out of the way, and sick about it all at the same time.

I've spent a month scouring the expensive catalogs for the meaningful toys, the lasting toys, the learning toys, the art supplies, the games and crafts that will bring the family together. I've made my list and I've checked it way more than twice, trying to stay on budget, be equitable, and have things that everyone will love both on Christmas morning, and long after. I take this very seriously. So, hang on to your order slips, Museum Tour, Hearthsong, Nova Natural and Back to Basics: you're about to get your cyberboom. 

But there are a few more items on my list, the ones that give me even more pause. I refuse to brave the mall and after roughly sixty fishing emails from ToysRUs this weekend I've decided to boycott them too. (There must be a term for that--when your marketing is so aggressive that it backfires, making people pissed enough that they'll look elsewhere.)

And I know I have to hit a sporting goods store for the 'gear' items on the boys' lists sometime quiet midday/midweek, but then there's still these last few things... these nagging six items...

Sometime between now and Christmas, I have to make a Target/WalMart run for what my husband and I call plasticrap.

Not literally, not rubber dog doo, but the jazzy-looking, one-hit-wonders of Toyland, the crap plastic toys that get advertised on TV, that will have *wow* factor for three to seven glorious minutes Christmas morning, followed by their random parts turning up in the bottom of toy bins, under the couch cushions or jamming up my central vac for the next six months when, if I can find enough of their parts, I hustle them on to the Thrift Barn.

Last Christmas, I tried to avoid this. I told my kids we were going plastic-free for Christmas, went so far as to show them the plastic sea in the Pacific . My then eight-year-old and fervent marine-life lover Hayden was horrified by this, but he was equally concerned about a Christmas without Bionicles. "But, Mom?" he asked in a heartbreakingly hopeful voice, "Can't our plastic just go in a landfill?"

So here's my question: 

How do you handle the influx of plasticrap, of the nagging need to buy meaningless, multipart, overmarketed toys?

Go ahead. You can tell me. I won't feel bad if you do it better than me, if you hand-make all your kids' gifts or buy them all at local craft sales, or if you have your kids convinced that Christmas is about cooking at the homeless shelter and knitting for the needy. But I just might steal some of your ideas for next year...

PS Last year's solution was also to let grandparents be exempt from my rules about the plasticrap, a la Max's ridiculously large collection of crazybones from his Maynah in the photo at right. As you can see from his Christmas morning grin, we are a-okay with this. And I have to tell you, the boys continue to love these, use them in trading situations with friends and play a modern version of jacks with them several times a week. Win win?