Christmas approaches! I know this as the local garden centre has stopped selling plants and has filled it’s halls with everything glitzy. Tinsel of every conceivable colour festoons the shelves, shimmering baubles sparkle in every colour of the rainbow. Christmas trees, real and fake, block every aisle. All colour coordinated for that perfect Christmas. And what did I expect – after all it is the first week in October! We only have 80 days which can’t possibly be enough time unless we start now.
Seriously – 80 days – I hear you can go around the world in that!
So being the uber-mum I am, I began to think about Christmas and identify what my children might like in three months time. For inspiration, I turned to the pages of the many catalogues that land on my doormat.
Opening one of the myriad of pretty notepads I buy for no other reason than I like them, I write Christmas 2011 and underline it and then begin!
Toys by their thousands fill the pages. Aha – a cd player complete with two microphones in a lurid plastic – perfect for my budding X-factor competitor. Colour options blue or pink? Hmm don’t really do pink but I suppose this once. I jot it down neatly in my book and move on.
Right – next a doll for the toddler who loves playing mummy. Next decision, boy doll in blue or girl doll in pink?
Either - I don’t really mind as I know the clothes will be stripped off within minutes and later found in some obscure place like the Hoover bag.
Either - I don’t really mind as I know the clothes will be stripped off within minutes and later found in some obscure place like the Hoover bag.
So now to the boy, this should be easy as he has been hankering after a micro scooter for ages. Just need to choose which one – pink or blue?
Are they having a laugh? Are the only colours in the world pink and blue? Do our children get any other choices? It would appear not.
For a rainbow nation (to borrow a phrase) we are fairly blinkered when it comes to our children. Pink or blue = boys’ toy or girls’ toy! Our children are growing up in a society that requires tolerance and acceptance yet from their first moments we are forcing them into pigeon holing themselves.
Oh I realise the manufacturer are trying to up their sales! If I buy a pink bike for my daughter they are banking on me buying a blue one for my son to avoid the ultimate humiliation of having a ‘girl’s bike’.
Unlucky – my son spent the first three months of his life in a pink sleeping bag and still sports a pink swimming jacket without batting an eyelid. I am not going to bow to their will!
Inspired by the riot of colours I saw at the garden centre, I have decided this Christmas I am going to go out of my way to choose colours other than blue and pink, in an attempt to balance the toys we are going to get given that are so stereotypically coloured.
Come on, let’s make an effort this Christmas to buck the pink/blue trend!
Branch out pick colours that make you smile. Show the manufacturers we are not as narrow minded as they believe.
Here’s to a rainbow this Christmas!
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