Last Saturday my daughter was invited to a birthday party. After a fabulous homemade cake and a few age-appropriate gamesin other words, just when I was ready to call it a daythe hosts invited us outside forthe piñata.

Great! I thought. My daughter managed to play with 15 kids without any major accidents. Should we just leave now bandage-free or should we stay and risk skull fracture and brain damage?

We stayed.

For those of you who haven't had the unmitigated excitement of piñata play, I need to explain that the stick doesn't come with the piñata. That means parents are required to produce something suitable with which to smash the thing. Said parents can become quite imaginative in this endeavor. In four years of piñata observance, I have seen baseball bats, broken brooms and sturdy branches.

But last Saturday was a first. Before my eyes, the dad handed a long and pointed bamboo stick to an active three year old. Behind him, a dozen or so kids on a sugar high scrambled to form a line.

Well, well, well, I thought. Who wants to be the first one impaled?

In a matter of seconds, the kids went from being well-behaved tots to salivating ruffians out for blood. Even my own little angel metamorphosed. She rid herself of her princess dress and yelled in a gravelly tone of voice I'm gonna break that thing open! I swear her eyes were bloody red.

The centuries-old piñata custom seems to be that the youngest kids get first crack at the thing. Not yet very well coordinated, they usually miss the target. But to give them credit, they often succeed in waking up the kids behind them.

As the line gets shorter and the kids get older (and stronger), the event becomes less like a game and more like a bout at a Vlad the Impaler exposition. This requires us parents to yell Step back! Step back! every few seconds or so to prevent someone's head from ending up on the end of a stick or somewhere in the bushes next to the garage. It also requires that we parents pry the stick/branch/broom out of our children's unwilling handsnot an easy task, given that an excited eight-year-old hopped-up on sugar is all muscle and no reason.

When Dora the Explorer finally split open, raining candy from her guts, the kids rushed and grabbed anything that hit the floor. My daughter got pushed over, stepped on and eventually left the battlefield with tears in her eyesher bag contained only grass, rocks and five broken lollipops.

I decided right then and there, amongst the candy wrappers and blood, to start a new support group: P.A.P., Parents Against Piñatas. This is my invitation. Anyone's welcome. There's only one rule:

I wield the stick.