Saturday Morning TV
When I was a kid, my little brother and I would get up at the crack of dawn every Saturday to watch cartoons. I thought of cartoons as something special. Every holiday, a series of animated specials would come on TV, and so in my mind, six hours of cartoons across three channels made every Saturday morning a holiday. Armed with our pillows, blankets, and our trusty TV Guide, we'd bunker down on the couch and alternate our picks every half hour until our beloved toons finally gave way to sports or real life would intervene, usually in the form of Mom turning off the TV to a chorus of whines to make us go get dressed for whatever it was we had to go do.
Of course, looking back on it now, it's easy to see that it was all an elaborate marketing scheme to sell cereal and toys. Most of the shows were pretty cheaply made, with simple animation and awful writing, with characters invented simply to make new toys for us to buy. Dad pointed this out to us more than once, but we didn't care. Outside of TV, toys were our life, and here we could see some our favorite toys engaged in adventures and stories, stories that would spill over into our playtime later that afternoon and on into the week.
Saturday morning TV has been long gone. My kids wouldn't even understand the concept. They can watch cartoons whenever they want, not just when the TV decides to show them. They don't need a TV Guide, because they're programming the TV themselves. And while a lot of the shows they want to watch are still shilling toys, a lot of them aren't. The animation is better, and even the writing has come up a notch.
On the weekend mornings when I get up with them and let my wife sleep in, I let them watch cartoons off the bat. I let them keep watching while they eat breakfast. I help them pick out new shows. I let them stay in their pajamas as long as they want, beached on the couch, laughing at the screen. Through the week, they have to wake up, get ready, and go to school, and I think that having a morning where you can just do what you want, when you want, is a great break for them. It reminds me of a happy ritual from my past, and in way, I get to share that with them.