Ha ha! Like I’d know!

It is very tricky to buy a Valentine’s Day gift for a guy. (Unless you don’t celebrate it, or think it’s a dumb holiday, in which case it’s not tricky at all.) I’m sure there ARE a FEW guys who enjoy getting flowers and chocolates and sentimental love notes. But in general I think a lot of us are stuck: it’s a holiday about sentimental/romantic love, and the established gifts are things that most guys are not keen on.

When we try to write them a hundred little love notes, or tell them what they mean to us, we’re giving them what WE’D want, not what THEY want—and that’s pretty much the opposite of romantic. (Many of us wouldn’t want the flowers or the chocolates or the hundred little love notes either, but that would be for another post.) I still remember the total failure of the Valentine’s Day symphony tickets I got for my high school boyfriend. “We get to dress up and go listen to romantic classical music with grown-ups!” He probably felt about that the way I would have felt if he’d gotten me a set of socket wrenches.

The goal, I think, is to find guy-romantic: not “Fine, let’s go make out in the car, then,” but something that actually shows some of the romantic spirit.
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When I was little, every Valentine’s Day morning there was a box of conversation hearts at our place at the table. I loved that, and so I wanted to find something to do for my own kids each year. I tried the conversation hearts, but the kids didn’t really like the taste. I tried making heart-shaped pancakes, but that ended in a temper tantrum. (Mine. It turns out I am more the sort of person who serves cereal in heart-shaped bowls.) I tried small boxes of chocolates (the kind made for kids, with a puppy or a panda or whatever on the heart-shaped front, and 4-6 pieces of chocolate inside), but the chocolates weren’t very yummy even for children.

One year I was out shopping before Valentine’s Day and the couple of kids with me went NUTS over the giant Hershey Kisses at the store. I went back later secretly and bought one for each kid, and they loved them, so that’s what I’ve done every year since—even now that they’re marked “#1 Teacher,” which, if you ask me, and I realize you haven’t, is a silly and limiting thing to do.

But perhaps your child responds to giant Hershey Kisses the way mine did to the boxes of assorted chocolates. Or perhaps your child has allergies, or gets too many candies from the classroom exchange already, or already gets the giant Hershey Kiss from the grandparents. In that case, I have some other, non-food ideas.

Melissa and Doug Heart Beads Set (photo from Amazon.com). (That one looks like it’s about to sell out; here’s another option, and another.)

Human Anatomy Heart (photo from Amazon.com). Ha ha, gross. But for the right child, this would be hilarious and awesome. (Here’s another option.)
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What I like about Valentine’s Day clothing is that a lot of it can be worn all year. Many little girl clothes have “Love” or hearts on them ANYWAY, whereas only Christmas outfits have Christmas trees.

Heart tights (image from OldNavy.com), sizes 0-6m - 4T/5T.

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I did well again at last year’s post-Valentine’s-Day clearances, so I have Phineas & Ferb valentines and Hello Kitty valentines and sticker puzzle valentines galore. And also I have five children in school this year, so it’s a good thing I have galore.

BUT. Considering how many years I’ve been fawning and cooing over the Etsy valentines options, you can bet CASH DOLLARS that when I have only one kid left in a Valentines-exchanging grade (I’d say “one or two kids,” but with twins in the group it would have to be “one or three”), I am going to be ALL OVER that. …Actually, it just occurred to me that my children are a little oblivious, and I could probably get a set for just Henry, or for just Elizabeth, without anyone even noticing. It’s not as if they know how much things cost.

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For Henry, age 4: Knight and Dragon 36-piece puzzle (photo from Amazon.com). Note that the box is (1) cute, (2) an impractical but fun shape, and (3) not a match to the puzzle. Whatever, I like it and it has the right number of pieces and he loves knights.

Melissa and Doug Pirate Costume (photo from Amazon.com). My parents are giving Henry this. We have the Knight Costume, and it was so much better-quality and more awesome than I’d expected. (I’d been picturing a Halloween costume, made of thin icky material that tears after one use. BUT NO: it’s like what you’d find in a classroom dress-up box.)
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Every year, EVERY YEAR, I feel like it is wayyyy too early to discuss gift ideas / holiday china / holiday cards and so everyone will be annoyed because OMG SWISTLE IT’S ONLY HALLOWEEN—and then every year I am sitting here with only two Wednesdays left before Christmas, thinking, “There’s no tiiiiiiiiiime! There’s no tiiiiiiiiiiime!!” Still on my post list: gifts that have to work for an unknown recipient, food gifts, holiday cards, holiday china patterns, a holiday craft a child can make as a gift and it’s something a non-related-to-the-child person might even WANT, gift-idea books for children, gift-idea books for adults, good general DVD gift sets, puzzle brand comparison, teacher gift ideas, stocking stuffers, gift ideas for 4/6/10/12-year-olds. We can pick two of those. And by “we” I mean “me,” because by the time you read the first of the two posts (this one), I’ll already be working on the second one. So. Next year don’t be surprised if I start the discussion in October.
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Henry and I have been working on a project: each week at the library, we get a large stack of books from the Christmas section, and then we read them and see what we think of them. Here is what we have learned: there are a lot of crappy books in the Christmas section.

I had thought that we’d have to narrow down our favorites to fit them into a reasonable-length post, but in fact the problem has been finding ENOUGH for a post. There are tons of good Christian Christmas nativity-story books, but I was looking for books more about the general holiday: the presents, the tree, the carols, the cookies, the stockings. It was okay if there was a little bit of Baby Jesus (like if the family in the book went to a Christmas Eve service), but we ruled out all the books where that was the exclusive deal. After that, the problem was just that so many books weren’t any fun to read, or were unbearably cheesy, or didn’t make any sense, or just barely related to Christmas at all.

For example, Madeline’s Christmas is weird, and not about Christmas, and it introduces a magical theme into a series I think of as being realistic. (That is, in the Madeline books a child might have surgery or be rescued from a river, but a child does not fly around on a magical carpet. Madeline’s Christmas shakes up that expectation.) Christmas Cricket started out totally charming me with both the pictures and words, but then veered off into lying to children about how cricket chirps are “angel songs,” while I was still thinking “NO, there is just a CRICKET living in your CHRISTMAS TREE, and you are going to end up going BERSERK because those things DO NOT SHUT UP, and now you won’t even be able to get RID of it because you have convinced your child that it is an angel. WAY TO GO.”

Well. We did find a FEW we liked.

Merry Christmas, Merry Crow (photo from Amazon.com). A crow flies hither and thither around a town, gathering a bunch of little items: a lost toy car, the ribbon decorating someone’s mailbox, a scrap of paper, a piece of orange peel. It turns out (spoiler alert!) he’s decorating a Christmas tree for all the animals to enjoy. This was a fun book to read and look at: the crow is sometimes drawn hugely close-up and sometimes tiny and hard to find, and there are Christmas activities (shopping, parade, church service) in the backgrounds.
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I can make lists of toys I’m considering for the kids this year, and I likely WILL make such lists. But I also like to see lists of toys someone else has actually opened and played with, so that’s the theme of today’s grouping. This is mostly toys I’ve RECENTLY been surprised by and pleased with, but I’m also putting in a couple that our family has found enduringly fun to play with, and also one that I recommend you buy not for an actual child but for a grown up who likes miniatures/dollhouses (or MAYBE for a VERY CAREFUL child of the quiet and meticulous sort).

Melissa & Doug Magnetic Hide and Seek Board (photo from Amazon.com). A couple of times a year, my mom and aunt go shopping to stock their gift shelves and the toy rooms they’re responsible for freshening. This is one of the toys that most impressed everyone when we opened it up to try it out. They’d already realized that each door opened to reveal something inside (cookie inside the cookie jar, car inside the garage, etc.), but we hadn’t realized the item inside would be a removable piece. And in typical Melissa & Doug “impress ‘em by going one better than they even knew they wanted” form, the pieces are magnetic so they don’t scatter everywhere if you tip the puzzle.

Caring Corners Nanny Oakes Interactive Nursery (photo from Amazon.com). This is another of their finds, and I think what most impressed me about it was how little I thought I’d like it, compared with how much I did like it.
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Holidays can be tricky to explain to children. Columbus Day, for example, after the children came home from school saying they’d learned (1) Columbus wasn’t supposed to be searching for America, and (2) he didn’t realize he had discovered something new, and (3) people were already living here, so isn’t that more like being a conqueror than a discoverer? “So what IS Columbus Day, Mother dear?” “A Monday off from school in October, children dear.”

Thanksgiving is tricky, too, with all the awkward issues that crop up now that we look back on it. BUT WE PERSEVERE. And this is what I love about children’s books: the authors too have struggled with how to explain it, but unlike me they have come to a conclusion, and I can read that conclusion to the children and then make modifications if necessary. (And if you’re looking for an assortment of books, all the books in this post qualify as of posting time for Amazon’s 4-for-3 deal: if you add four books to your cart, one of them will automatically be free.)

Thanksgiving is For Giving Thanks (photo from Amazon.com). “Yes, yes, pilgrims and Indians,” this book seems to say, “But perhaps it would be better at this point in history to focus on the MODERN meaning.” The things we eat! The things we are currently thankful for!
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Le Creuset 12-ounce pumpkin casserole (photo from Amazon.com). Let’s not even look at the price. Let’s just focus on the cuteness and imagine making each dinner guest their own personal Thanksgiving-leftovers casserole in one of these. They’re 4-for-3, so…. No. Let’s not compute the price. Let’s just daydream a little longer.

Wilton pumpkin-pie-shaped pie tin (photo from Amazon.com). This seems clever AND adorable, especially for families that make more than one kind of pie. Er, not that there’s any confusion once the pies have been cut into. Still. Cute.
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