It started a week ago, my kids had gone home from school with their dad and I’d missed a letter. After a night out putting the world to rights, and a few wrongs, I got a message from a girlfriend confirming “found a letter, spotty outfit and facepaint (optional)”
Where possible I refuse to buy a new outfit for every charity/festivity/school dress up. Theres a nativity, book day, halloween, christmas jumper, st David’s day, sports day, comic relief, children in need, easter bonnet, summer concert and fundraising for the school, there will also be school topic related dressing up, on Monday big kid’s a Roman goddess, the 4th incarnation of the same piece of gold fabric. Our school is usually pretty sensitive and sensible about it, if there’s a prize it goes to an obviously child-involved home-made effort. For school concerts there’s an emphasis on not spending money... but hey, if my kid needs a snowflake costume and I’m a full-time working single mum and Sainsbury’s is offering me a solution for the cost of 2 bottles of Rioja then I might just break the rule. Outfits take time, time is not free.
This time I’m in luck, small child has spotty pyjamas, big child has a plain pink onesie and I’m fair to middling with the facepaints.
Next up, big child wants to buy a pudsey keyring. She’s a good kid and this thing glows in the dark. I’m over my budget for the week but there’s £6 in my purse I was keeping for the charity collection, so there it goes, £4 on keyrings and £1 each for non-uniform on the day. I put big kid in charge of the money. An hour of pestering and bargaining for a keyring quickly turns into a 30 minute freak out about whether she should go to the office or the teacher or the big kids on the yard.
Meanwhile my facebook feed is filling with parents who don’t own spotty clothes. More than ten of you went to multiple supermarkets and still couldn’t find anything. At least five were up til gone midnight stitching spots onto clothes. I am reminded of a friend who stayed up all night (yes, all night) hand sewing a dracula outfit for her son to wear to a school disco.
A text message update the day before says the kids can also wear Pudsey pyjamas. Pudsey pyjamas? They’re lucky to have clean pyjamas!
More facebook panic, more real life panic, another 20 families are hearing the ‘spots tomorrow’ news for the first time and many more children are having melt-downs because they can’t possibly go to school without the correct branded charity t-shirt and matching headband.
The big day arrives, we are late leaving the house but they look pretty cool with their spotty bandage painted faces. I add the obligatory ‘look how cute my kids are’ facebook update, breathe a sigh of relief and drink my tea. Then the group chat starts up, all my best friends calling Pudsey every expletive you could reasonably associate with a charity bear.
Why are we all going bonkers about wearing the right stuff so we can give money to charity? If we gave the money we spent on merchandise directly to the charity they’d make even more money. When did giving to children who are in need of assistance become this ugly capitalist commercial monster? This is insane!
I thought it was over but then big kid comes home to tell me that a group of kids laughed at her because she wasn’t wearing anything spotty.
Can we all take a step back and just look and think for a minute please? Children in need 2016 raised 46.6million pounds. Awesome stuff, well done everyone! That’s just short of Neymar’s annual salary. We live in a world where charity is essential. (I mean, how else are we going to redistribute wealth to those who need it? It’s totally a fair system, right?!) I’m not for one second dissing charity, very many people actually rely on us bathing in beans for their survival. And yes it should be fun, there should be cake and there should be community. If the people who can afford to pay for essential services won’t then yes we sure as hell will pull together and do what we can to fix it. (You know we shouldn’t have to right? You know we could just fund this and have a monarchy in need day or something instead!?)
We are, you are, all awesome. Well done! But we absolutely don’t need to be buying into this crap. Give money yes but your plastic ears, noses and flowers don’t make your money any more useful.
