Appropos of Nothing

For some reason, anthropomorphism is on my mind. I don't know why, but I woke up this morning thinking of the McDonald's "gang." You might remember Mayor McCheese, the Hamburgler, and the singing and talking Chicken McNuggets. Where have they gone? You don't see them anymore, and a Good Thing Too.

I mean, how do you convince a toddler that it's okay to eat something she's just seen behaving sentiently on TV? (Okay, I can already feel the hate about taking a kid to McDonald's--sure, maybe it's better not to have her eat anything from there, but let's just view this philosophically, can we? And the whole "watching TV" too.)

You could try and reason with her--that it's just something that was made up, it doesn't reflect reality, but does that work? I remember my mother trying to reassure me about clowns at a circus we had just seen, telling me that "They weren't real." Which, of course, I thought meant that I had hallucinated the whole thing, so I replied "But I saw them." You can imagine the usefulness of that conversation.

So, rather than talk my own kids out of what they had seen, we just pushed it further. Antropomorphize away! We dreamed up a "Food Party" in their tummies, and the food they hadn't yet eaten was excited to go to the Food Party.

Yeah. I don't know why this came up today either, but what the hey. It's my blog, reflecting the flotsam and jetsam of my brain. Let us all be very afraid.