Children’s Wonderland at the Lucas County Rec Center is one of those local fixtures that has always just seemed to be there, like the High-Level Bridge, the UT clock tower and barely concealed racism.

It is not possible to accurately recall the experience from my 12-year-old point of view, but I have pleasant memories of the Eskimo-and-elf-filled displays and the general holiday spirit the event provided.

Completely separate from the spiritual birth-of-Christ celebration, there is a fake snow, gaudy tinsel, plastic side to Christmas that Americans seem to cherish and revel in. Children’s Wonderland neatly falls into the side of the holidays that produces strings of lights haphazardly draped over outdoor bushes, fruitcake, inflatable balloon Santas in NASCAR gear and annual series of Hallmark ornaments featuring Christmas stalwarts such as Batman, Elvis, The Wizard of Oz and Harry Potter (I have not checked, but I am guessing there will be a choice of “Twilight”-themed Hallmark ornaments soon. Nothing says “Happy Birthday, Jesus!” like a little plastic I-can’t-make-up-my-mind-between-Count-Chocula-and-Fruit-Brute Bella hanging from the tree).

Before last year, when we took our two toddler boys to see the event, it had been more than 30 years since I had seen Children’s Wonderland. I carried two specific memories of the display.

The first was a headless penguin sprawled at the bottom of an ice slide, its decapitated little bird-body belly down in the fake snow, its paint-chipped little flippers reaching up as if to say, “WTF happened to my head?!” I wasn’t scared or disturbed by the headless penguin; it seemed funny to me and my peers. We spent a fun bus ride back to school contemplating scenarios in which the little bird’s head was separated from its body. A “Friday the 13th”-type killer who stalked sexually active penguins instead of sexually active teens was one floated theory, and if you remember the old “Re-Animator” movie, you know where that line of giggling theory ended. Another vision involved a jealous love triangle between the dead penguin, a reindeer and a stocking-hanging woman from a “Christmas Eve in America” display. I have a vague recollection of another version that involves a frighteningly vivid scene of blasphemy best left in the vaults.

Who says American kids lack imagination?

The other feature I remember from Children’s Wonderland were the amazing wax statue machines on the way out. These wonderful magic boxes would take your quarters and turn them into mono-colored wax figures of Disney characters. You could watch the entire process as the mold came together, filled with molten wax, then parted to give birth to a green Donald Duck, a brown Jiminy Cricket or a black Mickey Mouse (by which I mean black, not to be confused with Black, such as the later innovation of Black Bart Simpson). I loved those stupid statues and kept them leaning on my dresser for years (leaning, because they never seemed to be able to stand on their own). I never painted them, like the illustrations on the machine showed; I kept them just the way they were. Last summer, I discovered several such machines at the Henry Ford Museum at Greenfield Village and paid a dollar for an Abraham Lincoln bust, but it was fragile and hollow; it may be a false memory, but I recall the Children’s Wonderland statues having a solid heft.

Anyway, even though I stopped attending the annual display (although now that I think about it, I may have taken a college-era date there to see if the penguin had been fixed, just to test her sense of humor and sexual adventure, to invoke “Re-Animator” again), it was comforting to know it was there. It’s the same phenomenon I witnessed while living in Washington D.C.; people who live there rarely visit the museums and monuments.

Three decades passed. We took our sons to see the display last year and they loved it, though most of the wax statue machines were out of order. The experience fell back into its comfortable place in the local scheme of things.

But the attraction failed to at least break even last year, so the Lucas County Commissioners, or at least two them — Pete Gerken and Tina Skeldon Wozniak — voted to mothball the elves, reindeer and penguins.

Now, Lucas County Commissioner Ben Konop and radio host/restaurateur Andrew Z are working to find volunteers to re-open the display at a location to be named later. Konop, flush with his victory from rallying tens of thousands of Lucas County residents to rise up and oust Dog Warden Tom Skeldon, has taken some heat on some of the local blogs because he is Jewish and yet is working to save a Christmas display. This criticism is unfounded because, A) Konop represents people of all religions; B) if Neil Diamond and Barbara Streisand can record Christmas albums, then there is some precedent; and C) as Bart Simpson says, “Christmas is the time when people of all religions come together to celebrate the birth of Santa Claus,” so lighten up.

At press time, it is not known if Konop and Andrew Z’s efforts will be successful, but I hope they will be. Lucas County’s kids deserve to have the same warm memories and filthy headless penguin associations that us older folks do.

If they fail, I hope they will find a good home for those wax statue machines. Maybe they can put them in storage with Tom Skeldon’s throne made of puppy skulls.

Michael S. Miller is editor in chief of Toledo Free Press. Contact him at mmiller@toledofreepress.com.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 at 3:52 pm and is filed under Lighting The Fuse, Opinion.
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