What do Takoma toddlers and Hollywood starlets have in common? (Besides the fact that they are constantly photographed.)

Yes, it’s swag.

The Christian Science Monitor reported that Hollywood stars at the Oscars this year were offered designer sequined stilettos, Mongolian jewelry, vitamins, handmade chocolates, aluminum art apples, avocado face oil and exotic trips.

And our kids can never leave a party without a Takoma version of a swag bag — often with candy, plastic jewelry and, my personal favorite, squirt guns.

But there’s a problem, actually a couple of them. One is that we want to teach our kids that not everything is about them. And a birthday party is the perfect venue. The kids go to celebrate a friend's special day, so it’s all about the friend. But the kids still have fun and even cake with ice cream. But the birthday kid should be the one who gets the presents. The goodie bag defeats that goal.

Before I go deeper into the diatribe, I want to say that I get the allure of gift bags. It’s fun to go to Now & Then and poke through the toys, imagining the manic delight on the sugar-addled kids’ faces as they pull out punching bags, Pokemon pencils and plastic eyeglasses with bloodshot eyeballs wobbling on the end of two springs. And, let’s face it, it’s fun to be generous with children.

But I learned the hard way that our kids are tough customers.

I’ll never forget the party for one of my kids where I reluctantly made up goodie bags only to see one child — whose name I have fortunately forgotten — dig quickly through the goodie bag and with a look of pure disgust on his face, close it up quickly and hand it to his mother.

I could have bought a skim latte with the money I spent for the stuff in his bag. And a monster ginger cookie.

But he had a point. The bags all have the same stuff in them, so a portion of the swag will inevitably be outright wasted. The salt lovers won’t like the candy and vice versa. The artistic kids won’t like the science-oriented stuff. And most of the inexpensive plastic stuff from Target — which is always cute and sometimes popular — will break within four months and end up in a landfill. Or they’ll
spend months at the bottom of a toy box in a cluttered bedroom in an overstuffed house, perhaps my house or yours.

In conversations with other moms — and it is always moms doing the gift bags — there seems to be a discomfort with the idea of a goodie bag but little appetite for ditching the idea. I say we be true to our ideals. If you love the idea of a goodie bag and completely disagree with me, then make up a goodie bag for your kids’ birthday parties.

But if, like me, you think the idea is deeply flawed — that kids should be able to celebrate their friends’ birthdays without receiving presents themselves, that our houses and landfills already have too much unloved cheap plastic and that the $40 would be better put toward Starbucks or the kids’ college educations — then just say no to the goodie bag.

Oh, and take the time you would have spent making them up and relax with a book.

Now, doesn’t that feel good?