All I wanted for Christmas (or Hanukah, or my birthday) was ______

November 26, 2005

Guest Post by Morbo

Last Sunday the Carpetbagger tossed out a non-political question about TV shows that were cancelled too early and got a flood of replies. Even I decided to get in on the fun.

Since it’s a holiday weekend, I’d like to do something similar today. Just for a moment, forget the buffoon in the White House, cast aside the antics of Tom DeLay and pretend Dick Cheney is a character from a bad political potboiler. Let your mind drift and answer the following: When you were a kid, what was the coolest present you ever got for Christmas, Hanukah, your birthday or some other gift-giving occasion?

Even a hard-as-nails cynic like me can’t help but smile every year when little Ralphie finally gets the air rifle he has pined for in “A Christmas Story.” I suppose most of us have a story, albeit less mad capped, like that about the one thing you just had to have and did in fact get. (Hopefully no one’s eye got shot out in the process.)

I’ll start. Mine was a G.I. Joe lunar capsule set. I received this in the late 1960s during the height of the space race. It included a silvery astronaut outfit for my doll – I’m sorry, “action figure” – a space helmet, all manner of cool equipment and of course, the gray capsule itself, modeled on Apollo somethingoranother.

I had it in my head that the moon was mountainous, so I bunched up a blanket on the floor and had Joe land repeatedly on the rocky surface. Even though this was supposed to be a peaceful mission, he took a gun along just in case. (See pictures of this item here.)

Just seeing it again puts a lump in my throat.

I’m thinkin’ that’s a Mercury capsule – I don’t remember them doing an Apollo.

A great present: my own stereo, with fold-down Garrard turntable, detachable speakers and the first Doors album to play on it…thekeez

  • When you were a kid, what was the coolest present you ever got for Christmas, Hanukah, your birthday or some other gift-giving occasion?

    When I was 11, I got a Gibson SG guitar for my birthday. I’d been playing a crappy K-Mart special for two years, so the Gibson meant I was finally playing a real guitar. I assumed it was only a matter of time before some keenly-observant talent scout noticed that I was obviously the next Hendrix and signed me to a multi-record deal.

    Then I discovered politics. Funny how things work out.

  • I’ll never forget my first transistor radio. My dad came home from work one day and handed me one for no reason at all. I spent many a night with it under my pillow, listening to baseball. I still love a ballgame on the radio more than 40 years later.

  • Oh man! The James Bond Briefcase, from the movie “From Russia, With Love”
    It had a pistol that fired plastic orange bullets. The pistol could be assembled into a rifle (that still shot the bullets) The case itself also shot the bullets out of the side. There was a rubber dagger concealed along one of the edges. And, if anyone attempted to open the case without the correct combination, a cap would go off.

    If a toy company raleased that today, they’d get sued into oblivion. To this 7 year old, it was the coolest toy ever made.

  • For my 7th birthday, my brother and I, whose birthday was a week before mine (and who had just turned 5), finished taking a bath together, and ran from the bathroom to the living room to see two identical cowboy outfits (hats, six-guns, holsters, etc) laid out on the living room couch for us. We had birthday cake and played cowboys all day. It was a special moment that we both remember.

    Another favorite toy was the Fort Apache set. It came with plastic walls, cavalry soldiers, horses, ladders, wagons, enough stuff to set up a little fort/village. I spent hours and hours constructing my own little western tales.

  • I got this “electronic” football game where you put plastic players on the board and then hit a button causing the board to vibrate so that the players “moved”. The next year I got the same kind of game but it featured racing horses. These are the most sophisticated “electronic” games I’ve ever been able to master.

  • My first thought was of the one that got away, a James Bond Roadrace set that I gazed at for months in the Sears Christmas catalogue. I’d always longed for it as Charles Foster Kane longed for Rosebud and Ahab longed for Moby-Dick, until about ten years ago, it was shown and described on a PBS show abour collectibles. It turns out that it was deeply defective, and tens of thousands were returned within the first two weeks after Christmas.

    The present that I did get that I remember most vividly was (four years later) the Beatles White Album, which was a world of listening.

  • To be honest, the coolest present I ever got was a full-sized toy model of a tripod mounted water-cooled 30mm machine gun circa WWII. It made a hella great shooting noise when you pushed a button on the handle and even shot fake plastic bullets from a magazine when you squeezed the trigger.

    The best part was that my sneaky older brother got one, too, but he didn’t know about the plastic bullet trick and I surprised the heck out of him in the living room. You should have seen his face!!!

    Ok, I was maybe six years old at the time and it was a different world. War was just harmless fun back then for us kids, and I would certainly not want any child of mine to have one of those things now.

    Sure was fun at the time, though, I have to confess. Lots of cool sounds and nobody got hurt.

  • Hey, Jackyl, I had one of those electric vibrating football games, too! Didn’t it drive you nuts when all the little plastic players took off every which way when you hit the button no matter how carefully you lined them up? Still makes me chuckle to think about it. 🙂

  • Great topic, Morbo.

    I was going to say that my favorite was a Commander Buzz Cory Space Station (a thin carboard space city which you punched out and assembled), but I think I actually sent away for that so it wasn’t technically a present. I was very much into space travel in the late forties and early fifties.

    When I was ten I got a Baldwin Acrosonic spinet piano which, unlike CB’s
    Gibson, did launch a bit of a music “career” – playing for local women’s club dinners and the like, and leading much later to playing acoustic guitar for a few years in San Francisco bars (nice job – few hours a week covered all my needs). But the piano was also a gift for the rest of the family to use (and abuse). Twenty-five years ago Mom finally gave the thing to me; it still plays well whether I do or not.

    The best gift, specifically given to me, would be the Irish Mail I got for Christmas when I was about eight. If you’re not familiar with them there’s a picture of one here. This is a toy. Mine was a large, red machine. When you really got pumping that handle forth and back you could go like hell through the housing project. It was amazing.

    Best non-event present was when our neighbors moved and they gave me their grown son’s Gilbert Chemistry Set. There were no safety concerns back then. I used to make gunpowder all the time (huge blue cloudes rolled across the neighborhood). Once when I was the backyard burning a bunch of stuff (no idea what it was) over the alchohol lamp it blew up in my face. I looked toward the living room window and saw my Mom’s horrified expression. I ran inside shouting “I’m okay, I’m okay.” She burst out laughing and took me to the mirror: my eyebrows, lashes and all the hair on the front of my head were gone.” I guess that’s what pushed me into a three year Chem major in college.

  • The James Bond briefcase also had a tiny camera embedded in the side. You could press a button near the handle and take a picture with it.

    That briefcase was so cool, wish I still had it.

    I also got a great chemistry set one year that included samples of all kinds of chemicals you could do experiments with including things like mercury and asbestos. Nowadays it would qualify as a toxic-waste Superfund site but back in the day it was considered to be a great gift for children.

  • Erik, I forgot all about the camera! That’s probably because my parents didn’t see the point in buying film for it. But that reminds me of another merchanised ‘toy’ that my cousin got. I don’t know who was drinking what when they dreamed the thing up, but it should go into the Hall of Shame for Dreadful Ideas.

    The 3 Stooges Darkroom Kit. I kid you not. What better way to celebrate the antics of Moe, Larry and Curly than to put little kids in a darkened room with a bunch of chemical trays?

  • A yellow Schwinn 3-speed with a high back, a banana seat, and high handle bars. It was the coolest!! I rode that thing EVERYWHERE!

  • Two stand out but from different periods. I thought the Vac-U-Form I got one year was pretty cool. It heated a thin sheet of plastic in a frame and when it was very soft and pliable, you flipped the frame and plastic over a shape on a perforated base and sucked the soft plastic down over the shape. It worked fairly well but it really smelled terrible and between the heater element and the “toxic” emissions I wouldn’t imagine they would be allowed today.

    The second, some years down the road from the Vac-U-Form, was a self contained Magnavox stereo along the lines of Jeff Keezel’s above. I really wanted that stereo and got it but I didn’t have many records. My folks had also bought a unicycle for my two sisters and I but no one was learning how to ride it. My mom said she would give $5 to the first one to ride it down the driveway and back so I messed with it one morning and when I did the deed she gave me the $5 and I went down and got Iron Butterfly’s In-a-gadda-da-vida.

    I had the crazy football game too. It was impossible to make the players do anything planned so we would always end up turning the screw out until the players hopped around like jumping beans and the vibrator rattled itself to a non-functional state. Ho-Ho-Ho.

    Drew, weren’t those bikes called Stingray’s? Wheelies all the way down the block. Great bikes.

  • The only people who have told about their best gifts seem to be men! So I will introduce the girls side…I may have been 5 or possibly 7 and I wanted a baby doll that you could feed a bottle of water to and it would wet it’s diaper. It may have been called a DiDee Doll…but this was longer ago then I care to mention…and I loved it.I think I got it for Christmas. I had the doll even after I was married and then the rubber it was made of got all gooey and I threw it out. I got a bike for my birthday one year and loved that also but the doll was best…just like a real baby…training for my adult years…I think all the toys are sort of training. Too bad so many of the boys toys were warlike!

  • Six Finger! Six Finger! Man alive! How did I ever get along with five! Hope others have heard of this. My feeling of superiority as I walked around with 11 fingers and the ability to defend myself with the Six Finger weaponry was intoxicating. Even had a writing pen.

  • In 1954 my father gave me a .22 cal single-shot rifle for my tenth birthday. The old man has been gone for 40 years and I am eligible for social security but it still have, and use, the rifle.

  • The only people who have told about their best gifts seem to be men!

    The only people who have told about their best gifts seem to be OLD! For my twelfth Christmas I got a drumset. That was in 1991. I played it for 10 years, before it finally fell apart (it was a crappy cheapo kit) and I had to get a new, much MUCH better one. ;o)

  • Great topic!!

    To be quite honest, I WAS Ralphie, and my best present ever was a Daisy Air Rifle. The old man was a lot like the old man in the movie, and I was the one the bullies always went after. My small town in Wyoming was a lot like the small town Ralphie lived in, and I even went through the “crush” thing with my third grade teacher.

    Hell, I even got my tongue stuck to a flag pole in the middle of winter, though they never did call the police or the fire department. 😉

  • One of my favorite gifts was a tall Japan robot with a shooting fist called Gaiking. It was pretty cool, but was promptly taken away from me when I aimed the fist at my friend and split his lip – he had to promptly be taken to the ER where he received several stiches….

  • Chris! Please!

    Memories are memories! And you’ll be surprised how time moves faster the
    “older” you get.

  • Maybe not the “coolest”, but undoubtedly the most-used/most-loved was the Fisher Price record player I got for Christmas at about 4. In fact, it makes me want to go troll eBay to find one right now….

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