We Irish have long prided ourselves on a mocking repudiation of wanton consumerism but brace yourself for a shocker: baby showers are spreading from the USA to Ireland the same insidious way that the Easter Bunny and line dancing did in the past. Imminent assimilation into a single global civilisation characterised only by consumption and niche dance crazes beckons.

Baby Showers: A Weird Concept
Glorifying something or someone before they get off the bus harks back to the pagan days of shuffling gaily around fires and making offerings to usher in bountiful harvests from Mother Earth’s swelling gourd.

Baby showers strip out all the old-fashioned fun (the sorcery, debauchery and fighting) and replace it with elevator music and gluten-free cakes. Some showers include naff games like pass the parcel (it’s never a condom) but none of their scented favour bags compare with the days of yore – back then if you risked drinking the local shaman’s ayahuasca you might wake up with second-degree burns on your arse or transmuted into the body of a bleating llama. Those were real celebrations.

But my objections to these newfangled baby showers go beyond mere absence of shapeshifting or opportunities to learn life lessons from raging bonfires.

Grossly Unfair
On a basic level it is grossly unfair to deny the unborn the glorious opportunity to ruin a get-together in their honour by having a baby shower. They deserve the chance to wait until the first guest arrives at the shindig before spontaneously developing an acute death-rattle cough, a feverish temperature or an itchy full-body rash that looks contagious. Experienced parents know that the only guaranteed cure for such ailments is to immediately cancel the party. So why deprive the child of these legendary memories? And memories like “We never got to see your Great Aunt Magda again because of your attention-seeking selfishness”.

Keeping Pregnancy Low Key
The notion of celebrating an unborn baby with gratuitous excess was a total anathema in Irish culture until recently. In fact God forbid you jinx the safe delivery of a fetus by even acknowledging the pregnancy before the head was showing. I’m not against imminent arrivals but I’m very opposed to putting the bump centre stage at an unboxing event. A party to honour someone who hasn’t arrived so their next of kin can live vicariously by unwrapping bath bombs and other Barbie-esque bullshit is absurd.

Unsure When to Give?
Childbirth is nature’s signal to begin shopping in earnest. Why? Because for a start the mother is now a veteran and must be celebrated. Equally the child, having just had their skull basically collapse and reform, is now a certified Champ. Other subtle gifting clues will be apparent postpartum to the eagle-eyed. Perhaps the child is ginger. This may be a source of pride for many but for others it’s a disconcerting shock especially if the regular plumber is also a ginge. Just be tactful in moments like these.

Yes, the sad reality is that the fantasy and frivolity of baby showers often disguise the fact that the marriage is destined to fail. After D-Day we all hear if the father’s been snorting coke in the delivery room or if the plumber keeps appearing for visits – such tell-tale signs are impossible to miss and are all great pointers for choosing appropriate ways to give.

Gifting Ideas
The personal touch is often good – friends or relatives often wait until the infant is a few months shitting itself old and offer to let the parents go back to bed while they do the caring. Minding someone else’s newborn vomit machine gives many of us nervous palpitations and so we might prefer to drop off a deli-bought lasagna which has been repackaged to look like a home-cooked meal. Try showering a young family in shit like that.

I’m often asked about lottery scratch cards. Certainly these are a well-regarded gift in rural Ireland but best practice recommends the child be at least three so they can fully appreciate the disappointment that will soon become a core building block of their lives. So hold back on these – for now.

Otherwise I’d specifically advise against gifting any swaddling newborn one of those thick puffy snow coats (unless they actually live in Siberia). Such coats offer the wearer little more than sweat, suffocation and a restriction of movement which by any other name is a straightjacket. Why is no one calling out this cutesy-child-torture? Another article needed here methinks.

Where’d You Put the Bathwater?
Many of us are simply swept away by this all-consuming moment of consuming in which every ounce of common sense is being thrown out with the bathwater. Why not keep the common sense? And why not just keep the damn water too? Let’s actually start asking if the water is properly dirty or even cold because last time I checked the Russians had turned off the gas to Western Europe, the Chinese were building the biggest army in human history and the guy in the White House just switched off the big neon sign that said “Land of the Free”.

So, no. There isn’t an endless supply of hot water, of shit that’s cute or landfill space for unwanted fluffy toys.Subscribed

On the other hand there is clearly an abundance of bad ideas and we’re increasingly motivated by them – baby showers, a phenomenon that started in the USA in the 1950’s being one exemplar.

Baby Shower Backlash
Irish X threads are hotly debating how we react to baby showers. The options are:
1) Embrace. (Tsk.)
2) Reject. (Good but simplistic.)
The outright favourite is number 3) Dig up and hang the cretin who invented baby showers while threatening something similar for anyone else who meddles in this buffoonery.

What Can Digging Up Bodies Actually Achieve?
Wait a second baby showers are only a symptom of a deeper problem. And sure, getting all midnight vigilante on it might be incredibly exhilarating and even develop close and life-long bonds with our co-conspirators but slow down, we can’t seriously dig up corpses just so we can take perverted pleasure in inflicting postmortem punishment while deeply traumatising the victim’s innocent descendants and striking fear into the hearts of many? Is that seriously the best plan we have?

It is? Can’t we talk about this first?

Ok, so I think “Dig-n-Hang-Em” interventions are best left in the past (but dammit never say never) with burning the gratuitous palatial houses of absentee landlords and assassinating their anti-Catholic henchmen. Be that as it may, perhaps the essence can be repackaged into something shiny, sleek and suitable for todays world. What if we don’t actually have to dig anyone up this time?

Could we organise secret nocturnal gatherings with colourful clothing and optional workshops on the art of tying knots and digging holes? And if we did, would that reignite the same enthusiastic participation of the past without the nasty business of handling skeletons? We could play music, sing songs and maybe eat some of those gluten free cakes. And maybe we’ll start to reverse the rising tide of individualism and materialism replacing it instead with the warmth of social cohesion and connection. Who the hell knows, perhaps neighbourhoods can become communities once more where struggling new mothers aren’t ever alone again once the damn party ends.

Come on. Let’s drink, let’s dance and God knows, we might even light a bonfire, no landlord houses ever, promise.