As those who follow me on social media may know by now, my family is obsessed with The Wiggles.  Many questions arise.  Aren’t they old?  What channel are they on? Is there a girl now?  There is so much to say, and so much to learn.  Lets go back to the beginning.  A far off time called… Christmas.

 

My wife and I are a “cut the cable” family.  Starting on December 1st we try to watch one Christmas themed thing every night.  Without cable we search Netflix and Hulu and other streaming sites for key words like Christmas, Santa, and Holidays.  Our 16 month old didn’t care.  He’s too young to really care about TV and was content with learning to walk and move his toy trucks around and steal food from our plates.  It worked out well.  We would watch some holiday shows and feel blessed with our new family, even though one family member couldn’t care less.

Until we watched The Wiggles Go Santa Go.

Oh my.

Little Declan paid attention to every minute.  He climbed up against the entertainment stand to do the butt  bounce dance.  He started asking for “go go go”.  He would run from other rooms for his favorite song, “We Three Elves”.  Go Santa Go became a daily airing during the Christmas season.  Which means right at December 26th we were ready for something else.

Hulu to the answer right again.  Hulu had many Wiggles “movies” (more a collection of songs to make a feature length show but without a story throughout).  Furry Tales, Wiggly Halloween, Taking Off (from which the new favorite, Do the Propeller, came from).  Lurking within was a feature that would change it all and launch an obsession with The Wiggles.

Hot Potatoes:  The Best of the Wiggles.

This feature shows off songs old and new from nearly 25 years of The Wiggles.  Every song tells which DVD, or VHS, these songs originally appeared on.  We started to study and hunt.  If Declan really liked a song then it was off to eBay to find the entire movie.  We began to research The Wiggles.  Found out all about the original Wiggles stepping down and the new ones coming in.  The Sam and Greg story.  The importance of Captain Feathersword to the group.  It became a bit of a thesis project and any new bit of information we could find became the night’s conversation.

I’ve always been big on things that are just pure good.  No agendas, no secrets, just something wholesome out there in this dangerous world.  Jim Henson and his creations were just flat out good and designed to make the world a better place.  Its rare to find anything like that but the Wiggles fit.  All of them just want to give the children of the world some fun.  It was great to find and the kind of thing we were happy to have our child watch.

Now thanks to one of our closest friends we get to go see The Wiggles live in concert later this year.  Of course we would love to have Declan meet them all face to face and we would have the opportunity to personally thank the entire band who have given us such joy in life.  That most likely wont happen.  But what will happen is a memory that will last the rest of our lives.  Our child at his happiest, seeing his heroes.  He holds a Lachey and Anthony stuffed doll every where he goes.  He’s so obsessed we bought back up ones for fear that one will be lost and the tears would not stop.  I want to give credit to the most unsung member, Caterina Mete.  Not an official Wiggle but a one woman show for the support team:  choreographer, dancer, assistant, camera operator.  That’s right we’ve fallen down so deep in this rabbit hole we now know who all the background and supporting players are.  Captain Feathersword has a pirate crew and we learned all their names.

Of course I look forward to the days when my boy will want to watch cartoons and read comics with me.  But in the meantime I will dance and sing along to every one of these songs and share pure joy and love with my wife and child.