Blogging To Restore Paternity And/Or Fear:
Christmas Cookies of Dysfunction
Given that the majority of what I write about centers around parenthood, it’s something of a job requirement for me to keep up with all the hippest trends, hottest gadgets, and biggest news in the world of parenting in order to find new material. Every morning I open up an RSS page containing the latest and greatest from a vast array of resources—Parenting.com, iVillage, Momversations, Strollerderby, ParentingHacks, MomLogic and the list goes on. Frankly, this daily tsunami of information is a tad overwhelming, not to mention repetitive.
In the past week alone, I’ve noticed at least a baker’s dozen or more article titles touting some variation of the headline, “Fun and Easy Cookies You Can Make with Your Child This Christmas.” Seriously? Are there really that many different fun and easy cookie recipes out there? I had no idea. At some point it occurred to me that maybe I should throw together a spreadsheet with a crude rating system to determine which of the umpteen different cookie mixes could indeed claim the undisputed title of being the easiest and most fun. In your face MomLogic!
Even so, had I actually gone through with this ranking, the results would’ve been skewed since I intended to place a higher value on the “easy” aspect of the cookie’s production while assigning a much lower rating to anything capable of inciting the potential for “fun.” My rationale here was that very simple cookies, low in merriment, equated to a sweet treat my kids could mirthlessly churn out faster than a roomful of seven year-olds hunched over sewing machines in a back-alley Bangkok warehouse.
I eventually abandoned the idea, though, after coming to grips with the unrealistic expectations involved with such a notion. Still, my snickerdoodle sweatshop is more realistic than the utter fantasy being depicted in the photos that accompany these Christmas confectionery exposés. I kid you not, every one of these posts shows some skinny mom with air-brushed skin and perfect teeth standing in her gourmet-size kitchen where she scoops out another glob of golden cookie dough and plops in down on the bar for her angelic children—one boy and one girl of course—to sculpt into shapes so symmetric, only ancient alien technology could’ve been used in producing something so precise. Essentially, all these photos are some variation of a life-size Holiday diorama Martha Stewart farted out of her poop chute after hitting the eggnog a little too hard.
(And besides, BetaDad and I are the token dads amidst a whole host of mommies. Come help a couple brothers out.)
