Here you can see our conspicuous lack of enthusiasm. Candy is cool, but whatever. |
Are you now or have you ever been a child? If you can answer "yes" to this question you likely know all about the piñata, how it's traditionally beaten and what is expected to fall out once it's busted to bits. If you answer "no" you may wish to consider hypnosis to determine your origins. It's just a thought.
But the traditions associated with piñatas are not what they used to be. According to old people I interviewed, piñatas are traditionally abused with an eagerness shared by all permitted participants in order to shred it asunder to get at the internal organs of candy within.
Those may have been the good old days, but these new and improved days offer something better and safer, if not more interesting to watch.
Kids these days aren't excited about smashing at the piñata, and I say that with authority as a kid of days which are these. It seems like a lot of work to me and I've been conditioned not to smack things with bats unless they're soft, foamy balls of the sort that can't shatter windows.
And it's not just me that feels this way. I had my junior assistant, brother Dominic with me when I researched this assignment and he had no desire to take an at-bat either. Like I said, it just seems like kind of a lot of work.
That disappointed the ineligible would-be partakers on hand. They wanted to see us whipped to a frenzy over whose turn it was, when it would be our turn, and how many of each other we'd accidentally whack in our piñatacidal fury. No such thing happened. They had to beg us to participate and most of us couldn't be persuaded.
The real disenchantment came when the piñata finally surrendered the contents of its high-fructose gullet. The elders suspected we'd all be standing around waiting for such a demise, but most of us had lost interest and gone back to other pursuits. Dominic was eating Goldfish Crackers, I was poking a dog in the face and Patrick was trying to figure out a nearby kiddy car.
Left - Here you can see us lazily picking through for quality, rather than quantity. Nothing against candy, we love it as much as if it were candy, which it is. It's just that when you're at a party full of cake, ice cream, chips, crackers, pigs-in-blankets and frankly anything else you could want, why would we wage war to nab up sweets from the lawn?
They thought we were all going to dive in and scramble for candy, but we're just not about that, and you should recognize that it's a good thing. Once we were each individually informed that there was a glut of free, though slightly abused candy laying on the ground for us to line our pockets, we took our time wandering in and we only took a couple pieces a piece.
When the dust settled, the overwhelming majority of the candy was still on the grass. Worse still, the dust that settled wasn't from our mayhem, it was just the windborne lingerings of quasi-confetti from the hide of the piñata.
The grownups were awfully let down by this, but we're just a product of what these same grownups have made us to be. They shouldn't feel bad about it. Again, these are all good things, and I'll tell you why.
Violence is wrong, even if your hate crime is exacted in the name of love for candy, even if it's expressed against a papier-mâché horsie. We know it's wrong, so unless it's full of get-out-of-trouble-free coupons, we're really not that motivated to destroy such a thing of beauty.
We know better than to eat off the floor and we know much better than to eat off the ground. You don't really want us to get excited about Smarties™ we find lying amongst the dandelions, do you?
A frenzy, whether to gather up candy or because we've eaten too much of it, can only lead to one thing, and that's the accidental bonking of heads together. Sure, the hollow knocking noise is pure comedy gold, but it's no fun for the bonkees involved.
Truthfully, we already have enough candy in our lives. We're the children of the small-family era, so our aunts, uncles, parents, grandparents and strangers of all sorts load us up and load us down with candy like no generation in the history of civilization. We get candy for going potty, for behaving, for fun and for no reason at all. This may deflate your fun of the piñata, but in real life it means the likelihood of us taking to shoplifting is diminished to nearly zero.
Ultimately our elders each had to help us stuff our reluctant pockets, and still the majority remained on the ground. I guess the lesson to be learned here is that if you want your piñata to be taken seriously, you better stock it with loot more hip than candy. I suggest promo flashlights, portable sticky note dispensers, blinking toys, whistles and maybe an air horn or India ink.
Above - Here you can see us carefully selecting which pieces of candy we think are worth picking up off the grass. Our pockets are mostly empty and you can even more important stuff too. You get to see one kid to far left eating a single piece of candy rather than grabbing more for later, and also a grownup trying to explain the virtue of grabbing the candy to another of us junior folkseses.
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