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.