PPSS: Post Piñata Stress Syndrome

I once helped my eldest daughter (when she was about 5 or so) make an overly-fortified, overly-hugified piñata for her birthday. At the party, we could not break the thing. It was a fortress. We did not intend to make it so Schwarzenegger. It was just that we had never done a papier-mâché piñata before, and we had no idea how few layers of paper it takes to make an indestructible horse. Word to the wise: About two or three layers is enough. I think we did, like, twenty layers or something. And did I mention? We made it HUGE. We literally could not afford to buy enough candy to fill it up, and taking out a home equity loan for piñata candy was out of the question. Even the amount of candy we did pour in was too much for any normal party. We supplied a few kids’ sweet-teeth desires for the foreseeable future beyond college graduation.

We suspended it from the drop-ceiling in the basement, but I feared the weight of the beast would pull down the house. The kids started out happy and (naturally) blindfolded. But in that swing-hampered state, they could not connect with the equine behemoth with enough force to break open even as much as a hoof. Eventually, we tilted the odds. We took the blindfold off. The kids were then able to connect with their full force. The result: Nada (that’s a little bit of Piñata Land lingo for you). The unfazed horse silently mocked. The kids were jones-ing for their sugar fix, but the beast was too well-built to give it up. In desperation, we called in a ringer. Tyler was the son of our dear friends, Keith and Barbara Braswell. They were not only our neighbors, but Keith also worked with me at the headquarters of the United Pentecostal Church International, there in the Hazelwood-Florissant area of St. Louis, Missouri. Tyler, then about 11 or 12, was the biggest boy at our house. And anyone could tell that it was not his first time to swing at something.

Thankfully, he was able to break open the floodgates of high-fructose heaven. It would have been embarrassing if we had been forced to resort to power tools. I’d wish I could now say something profound, but, really, the only points I have here are that it was funny and we used too much paper.