Santa brought my smart four-year-old grandniece a Rapunzel’s Tower for Christmas.

This gift is the latest in a series of toys and dolls she’s received that celebrate the world of princess fairy tales. For lack of a better term, she’s kinda princess-crazy. I found out that her cousins had even dressed her up as a princess on Christmas Eve. Goodness!

This morning, the princess craze came up during a meeting I had with fellow librarians and the fine folks at Sonic, America’s Drive-In. Adrienne and I from the Oklahoma Department of Libraries, Emily from the Metropolitan Library System, and Nancy and Becky with Sonic were discussing plans for the 2012 Statewide Summer Reading Program. (Sonic has been a corporate partner for the program since way back in 1998. They’re the best!) When Nancy mentioned that Sonic provides toys with an educational component in their Wacky Pack children’s meals, as opposed to the Ariels and Sleeping Beauties found in other restaurant kid meals, I said that was great, and I admitted that I was having a problem with the whole princess thing. Just what kind of message are we sending to our young girls, anyway?

Becky noted the recent marketing strategy of making more toys and products in pink—including fishing tackle boxes and camouflage clothing!—to attract girls and women. She also mentioned a YouTube video of a young girl commenting on gender marketing. (See below.)

Once our meeting was over, I headed down to my car, started the engine, and turned on the radio, which was tuned to KGOU, an NPR station. Right then, on the Dianne Rehm Show, a woman was talking about pink toys! (Really, you can’t make this kind of stuff up.) Turns out the guest was Peggy Orenstein, who has much to say about gender marketing and its possible impact on girls in her book Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture. From the book description:

Pink and pretty or predatory and hardened, sexualized girlhood influences our daughters from infancy onward, telling them that how a girl looks matters more than who she is. Somewhere between the exhilarating rise of Girl Power in the 1990s and today, the pursuit of physical perfection has been recast as a source—the source—of female empowerment. And commercialization has spread the message faster and farther, reaching girls at ever-younger ages.”

You know when there are reality shows featuring toddlers in tiaras that there’s a problem. Still, like Orenstein, I tend to believe that girls will be girls, and boys will be boys. Why fight nature? But that doesn’t mean we need to harden the gender differences within our culture. More than anything, I think I share a belief with the author that children should be children.  The author investigates her concerns like a master sleuth. More from the book description:

She visited Disneyland and the international toy fair, trolled American Girl Place and Pottery Barn Kids, and met beauty pageant parents with preschoolers tricked out like Vegas showgirls. She dissected the science, created an online avatar, and parsed the original fairy tales. The stakes turn out to be higher than she—or we—ever imagined: nothing less than the health, development, and futures of our girls.”

This is definitely a book I want to check out.

In another part of the forest, my smart eight-year-old grandnephew received a BB gun for Christmas. But that’s another story…

I adore my little niece and nephew. They are sweet, kind, intelligent children and they have loving parents who offer them unconditional love and who do a good job of teaching them right from wrong. It’s just that their “Great and Powerful Uncle Bill” (that’s how I sign my name in their gift books and greeting cards) tends to worry.

And before I leave you, here’s that YouTube video of young Riley ranting about pink toys.

What have you been reading these last dog days of summer?

Here’s what’s on my nightstand:

• Supersense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable by Bruce Hood (Beyond culture and the handing down of beliefs, Hood thinks there is something inherent in our nature that makes us believe the unbelievable.)

• The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde (An adventure in an alternate world, where people really–I mean, *really*–value literature. What kind of drugs is this author taking?)

• The Great Fables Crossover by Bill Willingham. (Latest installment of maybe the best comic/graphic novel series ever!)

(If you’ve been following this blog, you may be interested to know that Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land is no longer on the nightstand!)

And what has been taking up Miss Kitty’s time?

• No Going Back by Lyndon Stacey (An ex-cop and his retired police dog solve a crime.)

• Women, Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything by Geneen Roth (It’s about our relationship with food.)

• The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane by Katherine Howe (A modern-day woman discovers she has a connection to the Salem Witch Trials.)

Plus, Kitty says she’s so fed up with this weather she’s getting ready to read a Christmas romance: Scrooge and the Single Girl by Oklahoma’s own Christine Rimmer.

OK, now it’s your turn. What have you been reading this hot, hot season?

Hmmm… with all these titles, I wonder how many categories I should tag? Let’s see…

Start with David Sedaris’s Holidays on Ice,

 a collection of essays to appeal to both your inner grinch and your inner Santa. Included are stories about Sedaris’s job as a Macy’s elf, and a holiday letter that goes way off topic. His essay “Six to Eight Black Men” addresses the cultural differences between America and other parts of the world when it comes to the celebration of Christmas. I’ve heard him do this story on CD, and it’s fall-down-funny hilarious.

Follow up with a helping of Connie Willis’s Miracle and Other Christmas Stories.

 After Sedaris, you’ll appreciate this author’s sweet but irreverent tone. Willis is an author of wonderful science fiction stories, and she absolutely adores Christmas. She weaves her two loves into some of the most original holiday stories ever published. There’s a murder mystery, a tale of alien invasion, and an homage to the author’s favorite movie, “Miracle on 34th Street.” (Willis detests “It’s a Wonderful Life,” by the way, and that movie takes a number of funny hits in the story.) All of them delivered with good will and a dose of humor.

OK, I’ve given you bitter (Sedaris), and I’ve given you sweet (Willis).

Don’t forget an essential course on Christmas Eve: Clement C. Moore’s The Night Before Christmas. Be sure and find an edition that has the correct name for the seventh reindeer. (It’s Donder, folks, not

Donner!)  After all, your nerves will be really frazzled by then, and the last thing you need is an argument over a reindeer’s name!

“Contemporaries noted that the story’s popularity played a critical role in redefining the importance of Christmas and the major sentiments associated with the holiday. A Christmas Carol was written during a time of decline in the old Christmas traditions.^[4] “If Christmas, with its ancient and hospitable customs, its social and charitable observances, were in danger of decay, this is the book that would give them a new lease”, said English poet Thomas Hood.^[5"]]

This year I think I could use a new lease more than ever so enjoy.