Last month Justin and I transformed our life. We are awakened. We are enlivened. We are buoyant. We hold hands more. He's taken up whistling. My festering sore miraculously healed.

We did not find Jesus.

We did not buy a George Forman Grill. Well. We did buy a slow-cooker, which I'm told will result in a similar awakening/enlivening/delicious effortless buoyancy, but it's still in the box. Every time I walk past it, it gurbles under muffled breath and cardboard ME WANT BEANS and I shudder a little, daunted.

I'll tell you what we did.

We went to a post-Halloween party at a German household, which naturally involved sausages and fireworks, and marshmallows roasted in an outdoor fire pit, which I burnt to a carcinogenic crisp, which I think is less about traditional festspiel and more about typical Inglis buffoonenschtien. So I go inside to scrape the coagulated burnt off my hands and I follow childrens' voices upstairs and I see what the Germans have been keeping from me, from you, indeed from the entire world, those sly schutzengels.

In Germany, apparently, they create spaces called SPIELZIMMER. All the toys go into these spaces. And they stay there. And the children go into these spaces. And they stay there, playing, being cool, with names like Gustav and Felix. And the adults sit wearing black turtlenecks with legs crossed in contemporary recliners, sipping Weihenstephaner and conversing animatedly about architecture to the accompaniment of Wagner and synth-pop. IN ANOTHER ROOM.

Did you know this? Mmhmm. Yeah. Me neither. Say it with me (air-quotes): PLAYROOM.

Until our Deutsch awakening, our kids pretty much played wherever they wanted. Overlooking the toilet. At the teetering lip of vats of boiling acid. On top of my head. And so, thus, there were disembodied lego people and talking *@$&#%^!! Iggle Piggle dolls and dinkies underfoot everywhere. Great heaps of toys that would go untouched for months until the day Ben would upend the whole basket with a crash, lie down in the middle of it, and make like a snow angel in order to ensure the maximum blast radius of Chinese plastic. The kids had no space that was theirs. We had no space that was ours.

Then we discovered the SECRET OF DEUTSCHLAND.

The next day, we set to work dismantling beds and heaving dressers and vaccuming up surprised squirrel colonies and dustbunnies the size of medicine balls and three fossilized banana peels. We commandeered the guest room, which, until this point, was a guest room in which the guest was Ben. Seriously. This soulless, sparsely decorated void otherwise known as The Room Nobody Else Wants featured one small bed shoved into the corner, atop which Ben was unceremoniously plunked.

We made this guest room into a Little Boy Dormitory: two matching hand-me-down beds, a bookshelf. Still minimalist, still ripe for unceremonious plunking. But still. Theirs for sleeping, boys and brothers and now midnight conspirators.

Then we made Evan's old room into their spielzimmer.

AND MOVED ALL THE TOYS INTO IT. ALL OF THEM.

After the boys' heads stopped spinning at the sight of it, they went into it and we haven't seen them since.

THE WORLD'S WORST TRIPTYCH, ACTUALLY A FOURTYCH, OTHERWISE KNOWN AS A PHOTOGRAPHIC DOG'S BREAKFAST. BUT STILL. BEHOLD DAS SPIELZIMMER.

When we bought this house, it was 982 square feet. The day my belly exploded and we landed in the NICU with twins in dire straits, an excavator dug a hole for an addition. (Indeed, nothing amplifies the fun of prematurity and loss quite like an ongoing renovation that you can't afford. I recommend both experiences highly, and even more so, simultaneously. Only stampeding elephants and uncontrolled wildfires could have made those two months more enjoyable.)

What with our infestation of self-spawning hundred dollar bills, we splurged and made the addition ridiculously small, bringing the grand total of our living space to 1367 square feet or so, the calculation of which includes the four pallets that hold our woodpile, the grass space taken up by the canoe, two adirondack chairs and a hammock.

Which is to say we live in a leetle, leetle house. With leetle, leetle rooms. And a kitchen that is actually a hallway, but I'll save that foaming-at-the-mouth rant for another day.

Which is to say that having a playroom does not require you to have a Bavarian villa. As long as you don't mind stacking your children like lego.

Which is to say that the reign of the Chinese plastic is over, friends. Victory is ours.

When we gave the toys a home—and organized them so brilliantly that the children now LOVE TO CLEAN UP—we culled the herd. Trashed and donated anything that would burst into spontaneous renditions of "WE DID IT! WE DID IT! WE DID IT! YAY!" at 3 AM for no apparent reason. And, like that filthy hooligan Panic Room Ryan, we noted that they failed to note the absence of a whole damn lot. Which gets a newly liberated parent to thinking, as we stare down the relentless march of Christmas...

Tune in next time for Part Two of 'Scrooge Is The New Green', in which I will save the planet; ensure the continued health of our economy; ease the pain, itching and embarrassment of your financial pustules; and espouse the true meaning of Christmas. All in one fell swoop.

SPIELZIMMER DECOR IN THE WORDS OF THE ARTIST, EVAN: Look. Aliens and robots. The robots are just being robots. The aliens are at their water pumping station. They are getting water. One of them is mad. Look. There is grass.