Santa has come and gone, having left behind his Christmas toys of forever joy. Cars and planes, games and trains; a princess and gnomes, with castles and homes for them to slumber; army men and guns to decimate our numbers; a thousands Lego blocks to trip over in blunder, making one fall hard asunder.
Toys fill the room by the score, but ye always need more. Plastic playthings fill a box or two, and then add another. Ever expanding, a chest to encase, move some to the guest room that fills up the closet space.
Long ago, Mary & Joseph thanked the Magi bearing frankincense, gold and myrrh. But like Trojan Horsemen bearing gifts, the Three Wise Guys’ Christmas offerings morphed into a modern day plethora of plastic that multiply like the fish and loaves. The throng of toys lies across the floor in one holy mess that takes a miracle from our non-empowered children to pick it up.
Many tributaries confluent with the river of Christmas toys, the mother lode of gifted joys, before the commercial stream of commerce ultimately empties itself into the sea. Birthday presents from friends and family, and gifts of bribes from cereals and happy meals keep the current flowing.
Suffering sciatica we do declare, from picking toys up strewn here and there. Vanquished, feeling a pang of defeat, continuous pick up of playthings at our feet. There once was a woman from Nantucket, who picked up toys and tossed in a bucket, she then bare-stepped brontosaurus, her cursing creating quite a ruckus, as she screamed in despair an ‘ah fukket’.
At some point, some of this artificial dross must go if only to open space for more to come. The need to avoid detection limits the late night disposals. The half-broken toys and those with missing pieces are the first to go in short-lived parental victories. Like a burgeoning world population, the toss rate proceeds arithmetically; the incoming accumulate geometrically. One step out, two steps in.
This past Holiday Season, the ghost of Christmas Past led Scrooge to the front curb and opened the trash can lid for him to see. Inside, a discarded plastic doll with a smirking face prophesized that his dead body would turn to dust in a darkened grave in the fraction of the 500 years it would take for her polyethylene terephthalate to decompose in its destined trash heap mountain, or longer still if tossed into the deep blue sea.
We produce 300 million tons of plastic annually, some of it dumped in the Pacific Ocean, a mass that has reportedly grown to three times the size of France. Seabirds accumulate plastic in their stomachs, with approximately one million sea creature dying from plastic ingestion each year.
But that’s old news. Tis time ye pay all those bills that ensue, accrued on plastic credit cards soon due. Healthy New Year one and all.