I went out to a pizza restaurant in Ikebukuro recently with my wife and son, to celebrate my birthday. We passed a queue of people buying lottery tickets for the end of year big lottery draw.
We decided to stop by the kiosk and buy our own lottery ticket.
For the next 25 minutes or so, my wife and my nine year old son argued about how they were going to spend the jackpot.
“We’ll buy a big house, and nobody will have to work.”
“But if we buy a house that is too big, we will quickly run out of money and have to go back to work.”
I couldn’t help but laugh at their enthusiasm. Maybe my wife was just enjoying the fantasy of winning, but my son seemed quite confident that the money was already half in our pockets. After all, you can’t win if you don’t buy a ticket. And we have a ticket.
I blame “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”. I read it with my son. A big part of the story is the golden ticket to the factory, which everybody is extremely keen to find. Of course the hero Charlie finds one of the precious tickets.
“However small the chance was of striking lucky, the chance was there.”
But if the book risks giving an unrealistic impression of gambling, at least there is some more wholesome life advice.
Charlie says, “I wouldn’t give up my family for anything – not for all the chocolate in the world.”
That’s a
nice thought for the Christmas season.
Vocabulary:
wholesome – helping to produce good health and physical well-being, or moral well-being
[eg., Children
need more wholesome activities than watching tv and playing computer games.]
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