Why Do The Adults Play?

Musings on a Sad Rat, a Bandaged Bear and the Present and Future of Humanity

I just heard about the latest stuffed animal craze for Christmas, namely, Jellycats. (I know! I know! Where have I been? What can I say? It was nice and warm under that rock!) First, I don’t know why they are called “cats,” as they seem to depict many types of animals, and even fruits and vegetables. Second, the one that everyone wants (there’s always one) is a sad rat, which of course is sold out everywhere. Inevitably, my first reaction to such crazes is to shake my head an opine vociferously to my husband about the sad state of humanity for buying into these industry-created frenzies. I’m not even talking about kids here. Kids can be forgiven, I think, for reasons that I will outline below. Adults, however? I seem to direct my anti-corporate venom mostly toward adults who collect these things for themselves. I find that it fills me with an irrational amount of anger, and I would like to look at why this might be.

So, let’s get the kids out of the way first. I was a kid once, and when everyone wanted a Cabbage Patch Kid, I wanted one too. However, I was never really a completist where collections were concerned, though I do recall the thrill of getting Cabbage Patch Twins one year, and a Cabbage Patch Premie another. There was something about the different kinds of the same thing that appealed, I think. Still, I tended to have one or two toys I liked to play with at any given time, and most of the time, sad to say for my parents, these toys were not the coveted curly-haired monstrosities they had purchased for me so thoughtfully. In the end, I wasn’t sure what all the hype was about.

On the other hand, I had a teddybear that I received as a gift from some teacher-trainees with whom I worked one summer so they could get some experience working with a blind student. I loved that teddybear! And when, two months later, I went into the hospital with Appendicitis, I took it with me. Well, imagine my consternation after the operation to find a bandage on my beloved teddy! The nurses did it, I’m sure, as a way to show me that bandages were alright and that even my teddy was in solidarity with me, but I would have none of it! My teddy never had to go through all this pain, I reasoned, so why should they have marred his lovely fur with something so silly as an unnecessary bandage? Poor nurses! They were just trying to do their best, but here is a prime example of how much love a kid can attach to an inanimate object. Now, whether it is love rather than avarice that leads kids to become collectors, I don’t want to speculate, but I believe that there are some kids for whom inanimate things can become a kind of talisman or companion. You only have to witness the genuine sadness when a kid leaves a favourite toy behind and makes the parents go back and find it. The little world of that child is suddenly shaken to its core.

There is also the culture of trading among kids. From marbles to baseball cards to Pogs to Shopkins, trading has always been a thing, and having collections allows that lively culture to continue. I think it can fuel a bit of healthy competition as well, especially for rare acquisitions such as our friend the sad rat. It can also forge friendships, some that will last well beyond the schoolyard.

But now we move on to the adults. Why is play suddenly becoming a thing for adults? There’s the colouring-book craze, and now even adults are collecting these Jellycats and have contributed, likely significantly, to the shortage of sad rats in the world. but why? What is the point? I think it’s easy to spin the narrative that adults aren’t really adults anymore, that all of this is mere frivolity. At least, back in the day, adults could claim that they were making investments when they bought vintage Star Wars figures and the like. This gave their very obvious obsession a veneer of respectability. It seems now, though, that the idea of play among adults is gaining traction. I don’t think it’s so much about group play, but people seem to see it as another way to meditate or to tap into a slower side of the self.

Some people bake sourdough, and apparently, some people play with stuffed toys. I myself kept a few stuffies around for a long time, but when a certain silly Golden Retriever who shall remain nameless reduced many of them to rubble, I lost my taste for them. They did all have some sort of story attached to them though. There were reasons why I had them and reasons why I kept them, and when I finally decided to part with them, I did feel a twinge of regret. Even the beloved and once-forcibly-bandaged bear had to go.

But is it right to just dismiss adults who collect kids’ toys as immature consumerist jerks? I don’t know. I will never be one of this number, but there is something that people get from play as a practice. It may remind them of their essential humanity in a world that often treats humans as nothing more than sets and subsets of preferences. Whimsy is something we sorely need in this world, and perhaps play for adults brings something of that feeling back and reminds them that they don’t always have to take life so seriously.

At this point, the Christian in me starts shouting that of course life is serious! Of course we need to grow up and stop hiding behind distractions and get down to the very serious business of taking stock of ourselves and examining our consciences and the like. But there is the little matter of what we’re doing all these serious things for: the coming Kingdom, the new creation! I think that it will be the utterly serious person who has forgotten how to play who will actually say no to this new creation, because he or she won’t be able to understand it.

“What is all this frolicking and frivolity?” Our serious person will ask with genuine perplexity. “Surely we’re done with all that now! Surely it’s time for a nice, orderly world at last!” And it is that hardness of heart which will shut the too-serious person out of where they most wanted to be.

Of course, the completely frivolous person will have his or her troubles there as well, I think, so there has to be some kind of middle ground between childlike pleasure and mature struggle, but play should not be reserved for children. I think it allows us to keep the soil of our imaginations fertile in a time when many forces want to strip it from us. We are in the age of The Nothing, and we must do all we can to fight against it before Fantasia is destroyed! Otherwise, we will end up in the Swamps of Sadness, and there will be no way out, because we will have forgotten how to dream.

So, however angry these crazy Christmas toy marketing stories make me, especially when adults are horning in on what should be a kids’ thing, I try to temper that feeling with a warning not to take myself so seriously that I actually murder joy. I still have major questions about our western society, of course, but perhaps it’s time to just play, just do something for the sake of love and nothing else, and whatever I do, try not to be a sad rat.