Coloring Books

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

My wife and I were doing some long-needed spring cleaning over the weekend when we stumbled (quite literally, in my case) one of our kids’ “boxes of stuff” — you know, like when you fill up a box with your kid’s first grade report card and a tee-ball trophy and a favorite blanket or whatever.

Well, this one was our oldest son’s and it was basically a time capsule of the first 12 years or so of his life, with his Math Award from 6th grade and his kindergarten scrapbook and the stuffed blue bear he used to sleep with, named creatively as Blue Bear. It was enough to distract us from our chores for a good half an hour.

Anyway, one of the things we came across was a coloring book. This one was themed around the Disney/Pixar classic “Toy Story” and it featured some of the finest crayon work you’ll ever see from a three- or four-year-old.

It got me to thinking about how much time my sisters and I spent whiling away in the many coloring books we had when we were kids. While we were certainly never rich, our parents always seemed to have it in the budget to keep us fully stocked in crayons and a variety of coloring

See VIEWPOINT, page A10 VIEWPOINT

From page A4

books. We had Batman and Barbie and Wizard of Oz and Transformers and Spider-Man and Scooby-Doo and Smurfs and Star Wars and a ton of others.

One I remember especially fondly was this giant-sized — I mean like 30-by-40 inches or something — coloring book that was a full telling of “Twas the Night before Christmas,” and we would gang up and all color the same picture until it was done (which took a while, even with two, three or even four kids working on it if we had company over). I don’t think we ever did finish the whole thing and it probably perished, ironically in the Christmas Flood of 1987, along with many of our other belongings. Don’t worry, I’m sure we got more.

I guess we carried on the tradition of coloring books when my boys came along but by the time Baby Girl was born in 2006, we just didn’t pick it back up. I can’t say she never had any coloring books but as far back as I can recall, she was always just drawing or painting her own pictures on blank paper, which is cool too, but there was just something about taking those plain black-and-white line drawings and filling them with color — either according to the traditional colors you’d expect, like Superman’s classic red and blue suit, or by making up some new color scheme (I specifically remember coloring Batman and Joker in one book with each others’ color scheme, so like Batman was purple and green…

Anyway, we had fun and of course, the one rule of coloring books… “Stay inside the lines.” That might as well have been one of the Ten Commandments when I was a kid, even though somewhere along the way we switched to “Think outside the box.”

Which is, I admit, OK too.