The Internet Has Become Our Mother

OMG, no wonder I get eharmony ads!!!

My mom is a shutterbug, too.

I was disappointed when I didn’t get a Hot Wheels racing set for Xmas when I was 8 till I went over to a friend’s house and actually played with it. Within 20 minutes we had the tracks apart and we were beating each other over the head with them because IT WAS MORE FUN.

My most disappointing Xmas? When I was 11 and all I got was clothes instead of Space Lego which had just come on the market where I was. It seems my parents felt that I was all growed up and didn’t need Legos or any other toys for that matter. My disappointment was captured on Kodachrome film.

Who else is left at the end of this post dying to see the photos of 7 year old Nojo ripping open the Xmas presents?

@SanFranLefty: This, it seems to me, is an essential moment in stinque.

I remember getting up one Christmas morning – I think I was 5 or 6 – and going to look at the presents under the tree to discover that I did get the bike plus a whole lot more and plus it was snowing. I waited for my parents to wake up – poor sad silent solitary child that I was – the anticipation extending itself for what seemed like hours. When the presents finally happened they exceeded all expectations. Such an event has never happened since and like most of us I now live hunched over, anticipating disappointment.

My brothers and I had one of those Hot Wheels super charger sets. Ran on 4 D cells and had horizontal spinning foam wheels on the inside that provided the power boost, which would shoot the cars down the track. You could have come awesome crashes on the first RH turn depending on the freshness of the batteries and the design of the car. We also had a loop for the opposite side of the track. We of course would put the loop one track length down from the super charger just to see the crashes.

@ManchuCandidate: My brothers and I got BB guns one Christmas which we really enjoyed. The disappointment came when someone entered our house and stole them from us. Now I have a scoped Gamo .177 cal pellet rifle and a Walther CO2 .177 cal. pistol that I use for indoor and backyard target practice.

Giant transformer. Portable miniature replica of the Enterprise bridge, complete with spinning transporter bay. Meatloaf’s Bat Out Of Hell album. Set of C.S. Lewis books, meaning all of the Narnia books plus The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity.

Christmas was always great at our house.

@Benedick: I did not know they celebrated Christmas before the birth of Christ.

Very forward thinking, the ancient pictish hordes. What was Easter like?

I don’t recall ever being disappointed by Christmas gifts as a child, but I’ve experienced something like the reverse as an adult: “But we agreed to do a gift exchange. One present. Each. What am I supposed to do with this? And no gift receipt? Can’t we just go back to donations?” Of course, that’s now more or less mitigated by having a niece and nephew to buy fun presents for.

one year i got a record player with two permanently attached speakers and a bunch of 45s including the jackson five and the king wailing about being a hunk of burning love. the best part though was when mom broke out her old singles by little richard, chuck berry and jerry lee. i learned to rock and roll that christmas day. earlier one christmas morn, i awoke to find a letter from santa and his lazy ass elves blaming a missing part from NASA for the reason i didn’t get my GI Joe apollo space capsule like i picked out from the sears catalog months ago. so i had to wait about a week for my best gift while my selfish brother wouldn’t let me play with his new shit. how come somebody cool enough to make reindeer fly and drag a heavy laden sled around couldn’t get a part on time? the damn grinch woulda snuck down to florida and stole that missing part if he had to. especially after the who’s reformed him.

@jwmcsame: the best part though was when mom broke out her old singles by little richard, chuck berry and jerry lee

Your mom is wayyyyy cooler than my mom. Andrews Sisters.

@nojo: dad broke out both johnny cash live prison albums later. they weren’t appropriate for christmas day. moms coolness wore off later. she got all classical and NPRish with age. NPR wasn’t so bad though, as long as i could sneak out and get high first without nobody knowing. that part was a few years later.

@jwmcsame: My later bedroom was a converted garage that never quite became a family room as intended. That gave me a private entrance, which I utterly wasted because I didn’t get stoned or drunk until college.

@Tommmcatt Be Fat, And That Be That: You know those druids: they’ll nail anything that moves. As to Christmas, it wasn’t quite that far back. Though we did light candles on the tree pre electric twinkly bulbs. Every year there would be a rash of fires. One year there was even one in our house. Helpful Hint: Throwing gin at a burning Christmas tree doesn’t help.

@mellbell: We don’t do presents, haven’t done them for years. Christmas is so much more pleasant. Apart from bonuses for the staff, of course. But that goes without saying.

@Benedick: The gift exchange was supposed to be a compromise between no gifts (my preference) and several gifts, but some people don’t play by the rules.

@redmanlaw: You could have some awesome crashes on the first RH turn depending on the freshness of the batteries and the design of the car.

Clearly I was still coloring inside the lines, trying to get the damn thing to work as intended. As opposed to, say, abusing the shit out of it. I was such a nice boy.

@nojo:
Model kits were the Christmas presents that gave twice–first I got to assemble them (though they never looked like the picture on the box, maybe because of the model glue) and then I got to blow them up on the 4th of July.

@Jesuswalksinidaho: I like the Blow Shit Up part, but the other part requires, how you say, manual dexterity. I’m clumsy enough as it is without sniffing glue.

@Jesuswalksinidaho: Oh yes. Only for me it was Nov 5th, Guy Fawkes Night and the weeks leading up to it when the shops were full of penny bangers and sixpenny rockets. For a time we lived near streets of bombed and abandoned houses – London took decades to recover from WWII – and we’d set fire to them or blow up abandoned fridges. It was a simpler time.

@mellbell: Good God, woman, you’re a girl, put your foot down, insist you must have your own way. No more presents!. Unless it’s something very expensive. In which case you might make an exception.

@nojo: I was such a nice boy.. Blah blah blah. We want pictures!

@Benedick: You mean the fourth-grade picture of me taking a swing at a pitch — with the bat here, and the ball a foot above here? My dad loves that picture.

@ManchuCandidate: My parents refused to buy me the Super Charger set. I still bear the scars.

@nojo: That sounds like something we need to see. Yes. But also the Boy Performing Happiness picture. It sounds like it would make an interesting avatar. And plus anything from college years in underwear perhaps dancing along to the OCR of Pippin – but that goes without saying.

@blogenfreude: In England we were too poor for Hotwheels. We had to make do with Dampwheels.

@Benedick: You make this too easy, sometimes.

@jwmcsame: I did get the GI Joe Apollo capsule – but all I have left is the aluminum foil suit, and various bits and pieces of assorted Joes. Importantly, I have the original service manual for each of the branches, and one Marine flag. After decades in limbo, they are now in their proper place – in an original GI Joe footlocker stuffed in my son’s closet.

Speaking of Ye Olde Days, I have Seven Days in May on as I’m writing a memo. Also, I just finished a great book on the rise and fall of the manned bomber as the means of delivering nukes to the USSR.