I'd like to have a grown-up, adult-only conversation in the paragraphs that follow, if you don't mind. It's about pies.
If you're under the age of, let's say, 17, I have two things to say to you:
1) Congratulations on being the one youth who still reads newspapers and doesn't rely solely on emoji-based communication ... enjoy your time at Harvard :)
2) Could you please put this column aside unless you want to lose all of your childlike innocence in a crusty old grown-up mess.
Alright, have the kids all gone back to playing with their ninja apps and getting Bieber tattoos? Good.
Before we go any further I'll note that I'm going to be using the word "pies" as a secret code for another word that I'll be dancing around without writing. I'm doing this to further protect our shameful adult secrets, in case any youngsters somehow didn't blindly obey the orders of an adult and are still reading this.
Hopefully this code will be too tough for their young brains to crack while being easy enough for our old brains to figure out. As anyone who has ever tried to program a VCR knows, adults, not children, are super great at figuring things out.
Anyway, the "pies" I'm talking about are the pies that we feed our children a few times each year in the name of holiday fun. I don't remember ever questioning these pies when I was a child, mainly because all of these pies lead to great things: money, presents, chocolate!
Now that I'm a parent, however, I can't help but feel uneasy about all the pies. I probably wouldn't have given it a second thought except I have a wily son who seems to be a tiny bit bothered by the pies we feed him, and it's getting more and more awkward trying to serve them up without creating a sticky mess. It started with Easter a couple years back. Then just three years old, my son was already sharp enough to question why the hell a giant bunny would want to come into our house to hide things.
Had we ever seen the bunny? How would the bunny get into our supposedly safe and secure house? As I tried to answer the barrage of questions I got a very uneasy feeling.
"I dunno buddy, maybe the bunny is magic. But hey, free chocolate!" Was I serving my son a big tray of floppy-eared pies? His biggest concern was about where the bunny would go in the house. For some strange reason he was not OK with the idea of having a massive wild animal rooting around in his bedroom somehow hiding tiny objects with its huge, razor-sharped claws. Kids are so weird!
The solution we came up with was telling him we would make sure the bunny would not come into his bedroom. I'm glad he accepted that, because if he'd kept up his line of questioning for a few more minutes I'm sure I would have cracked. To make matters worse, the Easter Bunny, whoever that is, hid only a few pieces of chocolate in our house and the rest were those little plastic eggs filled with raisins and Cheerios. I'm telling my kid a bunch of pies and all he's getting is raisins? What kind of man am I? If George Washington's father asked me who chopped down the cherry tree, I'd be like, "I don't know, there was this giant-ass bunny hanging around earlier. It had an axe."
It was the same deal the following Christmas when my son started to pull apart the Santa story. Sure, my son said, Santa could bring me presents - and it better be Lego - but he'd need to stay out of my room!
The latest pie test arrived last week when my son lost his first tooth. He had many, many questions about this Tooth Fairy person.
How does the Tooth Fairy know where we live? What time exactly will the Tooth Fairy come? What does the Tooth Fairy do with all those teeth? My son was so concerned that he risked losing out on the cash by insisting the Tooth Fairy not come into his room. He left a little pillow outside the door and hoped for the best. Luckily the Tooth Fairy, whoever that is, figured it out and gave him a shiny coin.
So here we are. We rant and rave about politicians who tell pies - or, as it's currently known, Trumping - yet we celebrate our major holidays by spinning weird, elaborate pies of our own for our children.
What it comes right down to is my son has made the sensible decision he doesn't want fat, jolly old men; weird toothcollecting fairies; or giant furry mammals skulking around his bedroom. Meanwhile I'm forcing my children to swallow a bunch of dirty pies.
Who is the grown-up here? I've made a decision. One week from today I'm going to sit up all night until that Easter Bunny appears and I'm finally going to let the truth ring out, for my children, for my conscience, for a better, more honest future.
"Listen up, Bunny, whoever you are," I'll say. "No more raisins!"
Andy Prest is the sports editor for the North Shore News and writes a biweekly humour/lifestyle column. He can be reached via email at [email protected].
