A Beautiful Catastrophe
After all the preparation it was finally B-day. We woke up and the girls and I eagerly checked the progress of our flamingo piñata. Our design called for the candy to go in the large balloon-shaped body with the head serving as decoration, but our design had a flaw. We were a little too industrious with our layers of papier-mache and it wasn’t drying quickly enough. We got out the hair dryers and tried to speed up the process, but running short on time and still needing to decorate the bird and take care of the other party details, we threw caution to the wind and got out the needle to pop the balloons.

It was our moment of truth. Noel poked into the bulbous torso, and as the balloon slowly deflated, the wet walls of the papier-mache stuck to the balloon, pulling inward like a little universe collapsing on itself. With only an hour till her friends arrived, Noel was distraught to see her prized piñata looking like a like a crushed tin can.

She said, “Daddy, what are we going to do? Daddy,” and she went racing out of the room with tears running down her cheeks.

Our five hours of work and preparation were literally collapsing before our eyes. It was a catastrophe. A daughter’s simple wishes for a good birthday crushed, a father stuck in the worst kind of night-before-Christmas-toy-assembly nightmare, and a mother too stressed out about her made-from-scratch birthday cake decorated with leftover Halloween candy to pay much attention. Just two weeks in, the wheels seemed to be coming off our little experiment to consume things that are homegrown, homemade, local or used.

But something happened on our way to a disaster: We came up against a moment that would become a routine part of our year, a moment when we were forced to innovate and roll with the punches and adjust our expectations. We had always dreaded these moments—we had them long before we jumped into this experiment—and did our best to avoid them. But as the year progressed, we came to look forward to them as a push to get creative and improvise.

That was not my attitude on the morning of the birthday party however. But I had no choice but to move forward. I popped the smaller balloon in the flamingo’s head and it miraculously held its shape. I knocked on it and it responded with a solid clunk. During our construction process, we’d been less concerned with shoring up the head for the abuse of the party goers than we had been with the body. With fewer layers, it managed to dry more quickly.

I called out, “Noel, the head is OK. We’ll put the candy in the head.”

She slinked back into the room and gave the head a knock and said, “But what about the body? We can’t just use the head.”

I said optimistically, “I’ll fill it with bunched up newspaper and no one will know the difference. They’ll think we meant to do it this way.”

I cut a large flap in the body and started stuffing. Sure enough, it regained its shape, a little rumpled and saggy, but not too bad. I taped up the flap and went to work on the head, chopping a big enough hole to dump in the leftover Halloween candy we weren’t using to decorate the cake. That was all we had time to do before Noel’s friends started arriving. With no pink feathers or triangle beak or eyes, it looked like a newsprint version of a Monster’s Inc. character: long legs, stocky round body—with one big round eyeball protruding from the body—propped on the end of a long stem.

The party went surprisingly well. When the time came for the piñata, I tied a rope around the neck of our forlorn flamingo and hung it from the banister. The blindfolded kids took their turns at smashing open the head. They were totally unfazed by the creature and went at it like any other piñata. After a couple times through the line, one of the bigger kids took a huge swipe that made a pure connection, and the head went flying across the room, leaving the long neck of the deceased bird holding up the limp body. With a big cheer, kids piled on the dismembered body part and grabbed the candy. I looked on at the gruesome scene with a kind of twisted pride, the first ever 8-year-old-birthday flamingo decapitation.

At this point in the year, we were working with more of a fourfold motto than a fully formed moral compass for our lives as consumers. But what was quickly being unveiled was the hidden pattern of consumption that had been driving us all these years. We had been operating out of a sense of scarcity: scarcity of time and money, scarcity of energy and emotional availability. We woke up every morning feeling the burden of these scarce resources and were driven by this perpetual shortage, like there was some hidden embargo somewhere that mucked up the works.

In his book, Divine Economy: Theology and the Market, Stephen Long says that our basic forms of economic life are based on models of scarcity, that they actually demand it and create it. By contrast, he notes, the Christian God operates from the perspective of plenitude and abundance. He asserts the Christian story offers up an alternative way of living, drawing from the deep well of God’s abundance. He writes, “God’s inexhaustible plenitude suggests that we need not try to consume creation as our own. We need not cling to creaturely life, nor seek to flee from it. Instead, its desires can be properly ordered. This plenitude invites us to learn to participate in God’s own perfections, in a simplicity of life that rejoices in cooperation and gift rather than in conquest, competition and acquisition.”

Simplicity is not the first word that comes to mind as I reflect on Noel’s birthday party. It was complex and exhausting and complicated and inefficient. But it did arise from the “simplicity of life that rejoices in cooperation and gift” as opposed to the complexities of acquiring items across unfathomable supply chains. It was based on the simplicity of a household economy of time and skill and using what was at hand. And it did seem properly ordered, with parents and children elbow to elbow, splattering goo on each other, living in the wonder of uncharted shared experience. We were discovering the importance of proper complexity.

Later that evening, after we’d swept up the carnage from the day’s events, I asked Noel how she liked her party. She spoke glowingly about the whole affair and without any prompting she exclaimed, “My favorite part was the piñata.” I think she had in mind not just the joyous chaos of the flamingo head flying under the living room coffee table, but all the time we had spent preparing, the precarious moments of uncertainty that we had endured together, even the inconvenience of the whole thing. It had gathered us together. It caught us up in a different kind of family story where money and time are not oppressively in short supply, where she is not a cog in a family machine but, as Wendell Berry puts it, a child who belongs “to the world of love.”

From Year of Plenty by Craig L. Goodwin copyright © 2011 Sparkhouse Press an imprint of Augsburg Fortress, admin. Augsburg Fortress. Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved. Copies of the book may be purchased at AugsburgFortress.org. No further reproduction allowed without the written permission of Augsburg Fortress.