Tuesday, December 06, 2005

Christmas specials and bathroom breaks

Cay, at the House of Literature blog, has a fun post about happy childhood memories of watching Christmas specials on TV. I remember that same feeling so well: it was of the utmost importance to be home on the right night, to be finished eating, and to be in front of the TV at promptly 7 p.m. But, as I told Cay, there was one other skill that these TV specials instilled in us that my children, sadly, are lacking: I'm speaking, of course, of the way in which we had to time our bathroom breaks with commercial breaks. And, we had to move at breakneck speed lest we miss something. If we were in danger of that, a sibling would yell, "Hurry! It's BACK!"

My three-year-old, being raised in these video times, is still trying to figure out why the occasional "real" show can't be paused, which reminds me of an old New Yorker cartoon I saw years ago: a man is standing in the rain, changing a flat tire, and yelling at his child, "This is life! We can't change the channel!"

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