Friday, December 1, 2017

Pottery Barn Kids [sic]

My daughter Rachel has alerted me to the existence of Pottery Barn Kids merchandise: Le Creuset toy cookware and Williams Sonoma toy food, costing much more than many people can afford to spend on real cookware and real food. You can guess what we think about this stuff.

In our household the crucial culinary toy was a 1980s Little Tikes Kitchen, a topic of conversation in a piece of fambly videotape. “Vintage” Little Tikes Kitchens are now even more expensive than Pottery Barn toys.

comments: 4

Slywy said...

If you have a little "chef" (apparently "cook" isn't good enough), why not just involve them in day-to-day cooking that they can handle? Mixing by hand, measuring, etc. — and of course cleanup.

Slywy said...

Also, this puts me in mind of the Balsam Hill commercials, where the families look very affluent, their holiday decor corporate generic, and their children dress like the most prim preppies from the 1980s you can imagine. Not like the holidays at all to me, when we'd get out our old ornaments, many handmade, and put up our Christmas tree that looked specifically like ours because who else would have a handmade "Virgil" bell on it?

Michael Leddy said...

If I hadn’t already seen those commercials, I’d hate them now. But I’ve already seen and hate them. Fake jazz too!

Michael Leddy said...

About cooking: yes! But pretend is good too — a child might want to run a restaurant, take orders, serve the food, answer the telephone. (Someone else might have to play along.)