As a kid, I really liked elaborate parental fictions around mythical characters like the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy etc. As such, I'm going to go one better for my daughter and invent characters nobody else has. I'd like to introduce you to the concept of 'Tropical Mike'.
So Tropical Mike would be played by some friend of any gender who visits us roughly once a year. We would plan their visit in secret, then have our daughter start putting up pictures of palm trees, islands etc in order to 'begin summoning' Tropical Mike.
On the big day, our friend would walk in wearing an exuberantly colourful outfit, holding a really choice pineapple. We'd make a big deal of it. Then Tropical Mike would set us challenges - stuff like crawling through a tube or making up a song - in order to win the pineapple.
Our kid would win the pineapple and hopefully enjoy it. We'd do this every summer. Then one day, she would inevitably ask another kid at school whether they still believed Tropical Mike was real, and they'd just look all confused and she'd have her mind blown.
Love this potential twist to the Tropical Mike plan:
And of course we'll need to give our daughter mild folk villains too. Tropical Mike's dark reflection would be The Turnip Champ, a dour figure wearing a wrestling belt who would show up in early November with a 20kg sack of turnips & recite sincere poetry about root vegetables.
