Presents making you tense!

Yesterday slipped away somewhere. Between rushing to the market first thing, packing suitcases for our trip to Spain, going to collect the small grandson from school and then bringing him and his two sisters to our house to eat, the time just disappeared. Suddenly it was mid- and then late-evening. These are things that happen! 

As well as packing suitcases, I have been wrapping birthday presents for the smallest grandchild, who will be one year old, amazingly, next week. This smallest grandchild is the offspring of our son, who lives near London. Since we are spending tomorrow night at our son's house before flying to A Coruña on Saturday, we are taking parcels not only from us but also from all the little person's cousins living in our neck of the woods. 

As this is her first birthday, the party organised, I believe, for Sunday will be much more of a social occasion for the parents than for the small girl. This is how it should be. Parents of small children need to create a supportive network for each other. And besides, what usually happens is that a group of friends somehow decide almost unanimously to start producing offspring at more or less the same point in their lives. So really it's just another excuse for a grown-up party, often with people who were young people together at university, just with rag ruts on the floor as well. And a prodigious amount of cooing and gooing! 

This will change as the children grow older. I have just heard in the news about a kind of protest by the singer Myleene Klass. (No, I've not heard anything of hers either!) Apparently parents at her child's school received an email from the parents of a couple of children about to have a birthday. The import of this email was that the children concerned would like, in one case, a Kindle and, in the other, a rather expensive desk for their birthday presents. So would parents care to contribute, for example, £10 each so that the children could have the present of their dreams. Ms Klass objected that this was taking some of the fun out of birthdays and suggested, somewhat sarcastically, that parents might like to contribute to a collection for a live unicorn for her daughter. 

Now, we have contributed to expensive joint presents win the family. It works because everyone knows that grandparents will also give other smaller presents as well. The problem with using the same system with classmates is that it's a little more difficult, or at least less diplomatic, to suggest the value of the present that you should buy for someone else's child. Even amongst the wealthy, it's a bit presumptuous. Also, to make it work, it implies inviting the whole class to the party. This is part and parcel (not birthday presents) of the modern approach to children's birthday parties. 

Ms Klass and others in the discussion also made the point that children need to learn to choose presents for their friends. They should be involved in the whole process, not just turn up to the party. 

When my children were small, we used to invite a group of friends, selected by the children themselves, to their birthday parties. As a rule we held the parties at home, although we did branch out to a trip on a canal barge one year. Our grandchildren, on the other hand, have mostly been involved in parties to which the whole class is invited, usually held in some "party venue" with organised jollity, lots of rushing around a huge barn-like place and consuming too much sugar. It reduces mess at home. And at the end of the party the little host takes home a massive pile of presents. 

I remember being a child, hard as that may seem to some people, and I know that I did not like ALL the members of my junior school class enough to want to invite all of them to my party. Surely birthday parties are for friends, not a device for getting as many presents as possible. But if you are going to organise that kind of party, I suppose you can almost understand the parents' desire to use it as an opportunity for their child to receive an expensive present without said parents having to pay for it! 

Oh, it's wrong on so many levels! 

That's another rant over!