Before this last Christmas, I lived in a pretty normal home. It was always messy, because a 4-year-old lives here, but otherwise, I had no complaints. My daughter had her toys, my husband and I had my belongings, and all of our things coexisted together messily, but more or less peacefully.
That was before Christmas, when times were simpler. But I no longer live in a normal home. I live in a home that is comprised entirely of Frozen II toys and merchandise. By my estimates, we now own approximately 93% of all Frozen II merchandise ever manufactured. (And honestly, the remaining 7% is probably buried in the trunk of my car, which I still haven’t completely unpacked from holiday travels).
The inside of my home is now buried in icy blue merchandise, plush and plastic blonde and ginger sisters stacked in every conceivable corner. And of all of her post-holiday Frozen II spoils, one of my daughter’s favorite gifts has turned out to be the plush bathrobe she received, with Anna and Elsa’s faces stamped all over it.
[Correction: She actually received TWO Frozen bathrobes. This is the kind of Frozen takeover situation we’re dealing with in my home.]
She only sometimes wears the bathrobes after an actual bath. In general, she likes them as a daily item of clothing. She now prefers wearing the bathrobes over her clothes during the day. She eats with them on and plays with them on. She sometimes even sleeps with them on, too.
The effect is that when she is wearing the bathrobe, something about her instantly transforms from a 4-year-old little girl to a debonair gentleman in his 50s. The other day, I could have sworn that I saw her wrapped in her cozy bathrobe, relaxing on the couch, puffing on a cigar. It turned out that she was just chewing on a pencil, but I couldn’t erase the image.
I swear that the bathrobes have fundamentally changed something about her. She now pads around the house, instead of scampering. Instead of Goodnight Moon, at night, she relaxes with a copy of the New York Times, intermittently exclaiming, “Hmm!” and “Well, what do you know about that?” and “In THIS economy?” as she flips through the pages. Then she pauses to take a long drink of milk from a highball glass.
Or maybe I’m just imagining all of this. Maybe she’s just very cute and grownup-looking in her bathrobes, and I’ve gone completely delusional, driven mad by Frozen merchandise. Maybe I’ve got Frozen fever — which, as everyone knows, is the title of a short story in the Frozen Storybook Collection, one of the 18,000 Frozen books that I read to a little girl wearing a bathrobe every single glorious night.