It’s once again the Christmas season and as I’m writing this, I’ve already had one “Christmas” because my parents and sister came to visit last weekend and we opened gifts. There wasn’t anything unusual about the gift giving or anything, although I did find myself chuckling at how often someone opened a package and my mom said, “Well, it was on your wish list.”
When you think about it, it’s an odd thing to say to someone after they have opened a gift. Why explain to them that you bought something that they asked for? I have to think that this is a version of something my parents (and their generation, really) have been doing for decades, which is offering an explanation or detailed story as to the history of the gift or the rationale behind it, maybe so that you won’t make a face or seem ungrateful when you open it with an less than enthusaistic response. And I understand how you can have anxiety over someone opening something they bought for you–I’m in therapy for a reason, after all–and therefore preempt an unwanted response with some sort of explanation, self-deprecating talk, or even pointing out that the gift receipt is attached. But we’ve all been putting together wish lists for years, even before Amazon made it a feature. So why the worry?
I am sure the blame for this doesn’t rest squarely on the shoulders of Amazon, but I can say that having an online wishlist where you simply have to click a button in order to get something that someone wanted instead of planning a trip to Toys R Us like you’re in a heist movie has exascerbated the “greedy asshole” attitude that we all have each Christmas season when we don’t get what we want. And I say that we all have it because we do all have it; it’s just that we all express the attitude in different ways. Some of us thank a relative for the $50 gift card and mentally make a list of things that were on our wish lists that we didn’t get and will now buy; some of us make passive-aggressive comments; and yes, others of us throw temper tantrums.
And when those people get an off-list gift? Holy shit.
I can’t say if I had a good or bad attitude about opening gifts as a kid. I will claim that I was always grateful and polite, but I think that we all know that anyone who claims that is full of shit, so let’s just say that more often than not I had good manners. Then again, most of the time, I got what I wanted and if I didn’t, it was usually something that was either hard to find or a moonshot of a gift (the G.I. Joe aircraft carrier, for example). Usually when I got a gift that wasn’t on my list, it was clothes (which even as a teenager I rarely, if ever, actually asked for) or a small-sized toy or game to keep me busy while at my grandmother’s like travel-sized Hi-Q, some Matchbox cars, or yet another deck of cards. They came from my great aunts and uncles, my parents’ cousins, or friends of the family (whom I rarely, if ever, saw) and even as a kid, I knew that my parents probably didn’t mail them a photocopy of my Christmas list every year, so I just rolled with it. Besides, surprises were fun and every once in a while, an off-list gift would wind up becoming a personal favorite.
Like what? Well, I’m so glad you asked.
In the spirit of the season, and because I really have nothing better to write about right now, I’ve decided to do a rundown of some of the most random and most cherished “off-list” Christmas gifts that I received from the time I was a kid until the time I was a teenager.
Educational Toys and Games. Back in the early 2000s, I wrote an essay for a website called Christmas Magazine about the random gifts that my sister and I would get from a friend of my mom’s named Mrs. Bonner. The essay, “A Halfway Decent Thank-You Note”, was more about why I sucked at writing thank you notes than it was the gifts, but one of the things I mentioned was that Mrs. Bonner was known for sending us some of the most random stuff every year. Sometimes, the gifts were practical (a travel bag for toiletries) and others were odd (the “Bart Simpson Vehicle of Destruction” skateboard). More often than not, though, they fell into the category of “Educational Toys.” You know, the type of stuff that you’d beg your parents to bbuy from the gift shop of the Museum of Natural History and then play with maybe once before you finally gave up. I distinctly remember getting a small telescope one year but was not able to do much in terms of looking at stars because of trees blocking the view from my window and the telescope not being very powerful. I suppose I could have started down the path of voyeurism had my neighbors been interesting people, but they weren’t.
I got more than a few educational gifts over the years, but I think the one I remember the most was probably the Super Star Gazer Planetarium. At least I think that’s what it was called in the Sears Catalogue. I don’t know if Mrs. Bonner knew that I was really into science fiction, space travel, and astronomy stuff back when I was in elementary school or if she figured that every boy my age was, but one year, she sent me this toy that promised to project constellation patterns on my ceiling. What was basically comprised of was a lightbulb in a cannister (kind of like your average overhead projector) and a series of plastic disks that you placed on top of the cannister, each of which had specific pinhole patterns to mimic constellations. I think I tried using this thing once but my room either didn’t get dark enough to really see the stars on the ceiling or the ceiling fan was in the way. It eventually got shuffled off to the donation pile alongside the rock tumbler that my sister received but was never allowed to use. Really, though, do companies that make educational games do so knowing that they have a very limited amount of attention power or worth before the next action figure/video game spectacle of mindless violence comes along and that’s why the toys never really worked? I’m suddenly glad that I never got these things for my kid.
Sprint Cellular Style Walkie Talkies. The other “Bonner Gift” that’s on this list was a set of walkie talkies that I got probably around 1987 or 1988. I’m pretty sure that I’d owned a set of Walkie Talkies at some point, and they might have been the G.I. Joe ones that came out in the early 1980s. My friend had the black and orange Fisher-Price ones that were really cool and worked really well and I remember us playing with them for hours, so when I got these walkie-talkies for Christmas one year, I remember actually being pretty excited. My friends and I had been playing a lot of “army” in our backyards (fighting enemy soldiers with our Entertech guns), so having a way to communicate on the battlefield was pretty awesome.
Now, the walkie-talkies that you see on the right were pretty much the exact model that I received for Christmas, although for some reason I remember that the antennae weren’t rubber but were instead those thin metal antennae that usually broke at the top so that you couldn’t really raise them or lower them without puncturing your hand. But they did have the dial pad on them and if you pressed one of those buttons while transmitting to the other walkie talkie, you’d send a tone just like you were dialing a phone. So these were walkie talkies crossed with a Zack Morris Cell Phone? Anyway, it was around this time where my friends and I were obsessed with looking up random things, especially about combat and the army, in reference books (okay, it was mostly me). I, at one point, had looked up Morse code and decided to use these to practice sending secret messages. The only one I ever remembered, though, was “SOS.”
Legions of Power and the Panosh Place Voltron Toys. I’m grouping these two together because I actually wrote about them years ago:
So I won’t go into too much detail about these except to say that if I were to talk about “off-list” toys that I got for Christmas, these would be at the top of my list. Legions of Power were a Tonka-brand toy that was all about building spaceships and other vehicles with different “forces” to fight one another. Some of the toys had motorized components, so what you had was a combination of Star Wars, Transformers, and Lego Technic. Honestly, they were pretty awesome.
As far as the Panosh Place Voltron toys were concerned, I can’t recall why I never asked for them because I was really into Voltron. My best guess is that by the time they were released, I already owned the die-cast metal version of the Lion Force, and the show and my love of it had started to run its course. But my Aunt Ingrid gave me the Castle of Lions playset one Christmas and slowly but surely–mostly due to closeout sales at toy stores like Play World–I collected most of the lions (I think I was missing the red lion at one point), although I didn’t have any of the villains for the Voltron Force to fight against. Of course, that didn’t matter because the toys were compatible with Star Wars and G.I. Joe figures, and that made them awesome.
Really, though, both of these toys wound up being “underrated gems” as far as 1980s toys were concerned. I don’t think that either was on the market for terribly long and am not sure how many people actually owned them. The going price for the Panosh Place Voltron on eBay varies. People try to sell it for hundreds of dollars but I see most of it going in the $25-$75 range with the Voltron in the picture being the outlier and selling for $188.95. The Legions of Power stuff will sell for a lot if you have a massive amount of it to sell, but individual sets tend to go for around $25, which is probably what they retailed for in 1985.
Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World’s Greatest Comics by Les Daniels. Have I written about the Les Daniels books before? I can’t remember. Anyway, for the longest time they were (and in some cases, still are) the gold standard when it comes to the history of comic books and comic book characters. Amazon has this being published on January 1, 1991 but I want to say that I got this for Christmas in 1990 because I received the hardcover edition as a gift. I guess whether I got it in 1990 or 1991 is a moot point, though; what’s important is that I didn’t know this book existed until I got it from my Uncle Lou, who had prior to this been known in my family as the “toy king” because he always bought my sister and I the massive playsets and vehicles for whatever we were into.
I’d started “seriously” reading and collecting comics in the spring and summer of 1990 and had got full-on into Marvel’s Distinguished Competition, so this wouldn’t have been my first choice for a book to read. But from the moment I got it, I was enthralled.
Okay, that’s not entirely true. My first thought was: “Wait … didn’t Marvel just celebrate its 25th Anniversary?” Once I got over that, I cracked open the book and was enthralled. Along with the introduction to The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told and the copy of Tales of the Dark Knight: His First Fifty Years that I kept checking out of the library, this was my first dive into the history of comic books and it was amazing. I may one day do an episode or post about all of the Les Daniels books I own (I have the Marvel book, the DC book, and the books about Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman), so I’ll just say that for someone who loved “making of” specials and the back stories behind my favorite pieces of entertainment, this was absolutely perfect … and probably started me on the dangerous habit of buying coffee table books about entertainment.
The “Jeremy” Import CD Single. I’m going to end with another Uncle Lou (formerly the “Toy King”) gift, which I got for Christmas in 1992 (my birthday gift that June had been a CD stereo system). I think that Ten was one of the “Columbia House 13” earlier that year and among all of those Nineties “alternative” bands (I don’t think I was using the word “grunge” yet), although I only knew the band from that album and the Singles soundtrack along with what I heard on the radio. A lack of access to MTV as well as other entertainment/music news that wasn’t, say, Entertainment Tonight, meant that I didn’t know much. When I opened this, my uncle explained that it was an import single and was pretty rare, which I took as meaning it was a big deal because at that point I had friends collecting import Metallica singles.
So why was this a big deal? Well, up until a domestic version of the single was released in 1995, the only way that you could get the song “Yellow Ledbetter” was by buying this import CD. Of course, I wasn’t familiar with “Yellow Ledbetter” prior to this, but I will say that it quickly became and still is one of my favorite Pearl Jam songs of all time. I wouldn’t go on to buy a lot of import CDs after this–I know that I have Fixed, which was a Nine Inch Nails EP that was a follow-up to Broken and that might be about it–but I still think it’s pretty cool to own this piece of Nineties alternative rock history.
I still fill out wish lists as an adult–it does honestly help my family shop for stuff around birthdays and Christmas–but it’s still cool to get surprises. And while I look back with this fondness, I am hopeful for some surprises this year.
Pop Culture Affidavit 