The little girl across the street, who must be 5-6 years old by now (they moved in when her mom was pregnant with her), is sitting behind a little white play table that her dad carried out for her, at the end of the walkway in front of their house. She has a little cloth on the table and various things displayed both on the table and on another cloth next to her on the street. She’s been out there for at least an hour, on a sunny, chilly, beautiful fall Saturday morning. She’s bundled up in a winter coat (opened) and a winter hat, but no mittens. There are two homemade signs on printer paper hung on the hedges to either side of her but I can’t read what they say without doing my best Gladys Kravits.*
I opened the bathroom window after my shower, and could hear her singing out something over and over but couldn’t make out what exactly she was saying. After I was done and in the kitchen tidying up, I opened the kitchen windows as well, and then I could hear that she was warbling “Kom o köp!” (Come and buy) and had been joined by another little girl. They’ve been very busy rearranging their wares, playing music, and dancing around in the street. From the window, everything they have for sale looks like their demographic is other little girls: lots of pink!
Anders came back just now from Byggmax (he was buying sand to finish replacing the paving stones in the alley between the house and garage), and told me that he went over to see what they were selling, and they had a Panda Christmas catalog. Panda catalogs are very common tools used by children in Sweden to earn a little extra money around Christmas time. Any child can sell, with a parent’s knowledge and approval, and it’s quite common that we get 3-4 kids knocking at our door in October asking if we are interested, which of course we are. I’ve already ordered a couple of things from a little boy a few weeks ago, and just now, I went across the street and ordered a couple more (hopefully not the exact same things, because I can’t remember what I ordered from the first kid, but if so, oh well, haha!). There’s no obligation on the kids to sell anything at all or for any specific amount. They earn a little percentage from each thing they do sell, and most Swedes, I suspect, are like me: willing to buy something from each of the kids that come around.
All the other stuff they had on the cloths was, as I suspected, little girl things in pink and rainbow colors. Swedish has a great word for this kind of thing: krimskrams, which literally means “miscellaneous small stuff”. Small items or gadgets of little value, often a collection of unnecessary items. It is used to describe things that are cheap, flashy, or just plain junk, which can be both physical objects (e.g., souvenirs, little plushies) or abstract things like unnecessary words or additions. In English, we’d probably just say junk, but krimskrams sounds much nicer!
Panda catalogs and majblommor, which are flower pins and stickers sold by children in the month of May to raise money for a Swedish children’s rights non-profit (the kids keep 10% of what they sell), have been around for years. Kids all the way up to high school age also sell from various catalogs to raise money for their school classes (often for a school trip), Scouts, or their sports teams. My kids (especially Karin, for her soccer teams) sold sausages a couple of times, cookies, and Newbody products, which are high-quality clothing items. At one point, Karin’s soccer team even tried selling laundry detergent door-to-door, but it was not a hit.
This whole thing feels so timeless, too, considering that my siblings and I did the exact same things when we were kids. I can remember setting up my parent’s card table on the sidewalk in the various places we lived, and selling my own krimskrams and my drawings, and possibly the proverbial lemonade or Kool-Aid, to neighborhood friends. At some point, for school, I sold boxes of greeting cards, some of which my grandmother still had when she passed.
The sky is solidly blue and the sun is shining as hard as it can, bathing all the autumn colors in light. I’ve done pretty much nothing of interest so far today and I’m glad of it. Relax and recharge is my only goal for weekends right now. I just checked and the girls have cleared all of their stuff away and gone inside, though the table is still sitting there. Their grandmother and cousins were there to visit (their grandmother was spending money on stuff when I came over) so I hope they’re spending the day playing and having a great time together and that they made a little money and got a few more orders for their Panda catalog.
Happy weekend!
*Boomer alert! That’s the nosey neighbor from Bewitched which I watched religiously as a young girl, because I loved Samantha Stephens and wanted to be a witch like her. I was very jealous of Tabitha (and also thought their names were SO COOL).