The Spirit of Christmas Presents
Part 2
or, The Best Christmas Presents of All Time, whether or not I got them. And mostly I didn't get 'em, simply because like pretty much everybody else I knew growing up, our parents didn't really have any money. Oh, sure, they had enough to pay for boring stuff like school clothes and food, and the occasional dinner out at Burger King, and we could always count on Santa bringing us one thing on our list that we really, really wanted ... but face it, kids are rotten little greedy monsters (I was, anyway) and the differences between the lists of "What I Asked Santa For" and "What Santa Actually Brought Me" were rather disparate.
Not that I'm complaining in hindsight; actually I can't remember a Christmas where I was truly disappointed in anything I got. It's just that there was always some other kid down the block who got something incredibly amazing and expensive for Christmas, which of course they would tell you all about, and that kid was always the kid I knew just well enough to talk to but not well enough that he'd let me play with whatever cool thing he got. Creep.
So, anyway, at the top of my list of Best Christmas Presents of All Time, #1 has to be: An Electric Car. And by Electric Car I don't mean something ecological and trendy by today's standards, none of that, what I'm talking about is a scaled-down racing car (or really any scaled-down car, could be an Edsel for all I'd care) with an electric motor, that you could actually sit in and drive down the sidewalk. The ultimate in cool.
And yes of course these are ridiculously expensive (the Ferrari in the picture is $600, not including shipping), your average kid would crash it in a week, assuming he was still driving it, which he wouldn't be because in reality it has a top speed of five miles per hour, meaning you can even walk faster, and nothing spoils speeding along in your new Ferrari like being passed up by little girls on their bikes (with training wheels, even). I didn't say it was anything resembling practical, but who wants a practical Christmas present anyway?
I never knew anyone who ever got an electric car for Christmas, or for any other gift, but I heard stories of friends of friends who had these. But these friends of friends also had a swimming pool -- built-in, of course -- and at least one step-parent, both things that just didn't occur in my world and were more than a bit frightening in their own ways.
Number 2 on the list, just a fraction of an inch below number one, is: An Erector Set. Preferably with a motor and about 47,000 pieces, most of which you'd lose within an hour of opening the case, while trying to build an attack robot and succeeding only in cross-threading four wheels together into something vaguely resembling a wobbly roller skate.
I never got one of these either, though I remember (probably wrongly) my friend Robert Thomas (whose initials were RAT, which we all thought was hilarious) having an Erector set, which I envied him for. If it was him, that is. Anyway, whoever had one of these, I envied him. It was missing a bunch of parts, enough so that there was always one less of whatever it is you needed to finish making anything functional (e.g. you'd have three wheels if you needed four, seven angled pieces if you needed eight, etc.).
An Erector set is usually priced at a dollar amount that is tantalizingly in theoretical reach of asking Santa for one of these, but even so it would mean getting a less-featured number of pieces -- and is there nothing worse than getting a set of something that is just the step below the level of the set you really want? -- and, importantly, it was expensive enough that you knew that Santa would bring you the Erector set and the Erector set only. And no kid that I know wants to blow his entire Christmas wish wad on one thing and one thing only. Better to get half a dozen Matchbox cars and a garage, than an Erector set. It was a hard call, but you've gotta work the odds when it comes to Santa.
And taking the bronze for Best Christmas present of all time: The Thingmaker. Preferably the Fright Factory edition, but I would have turned cartwheels over any version.
The Thingmaker was a toy made by Mattel in the 1960's, back when toys were toys and Mattel was more than an importer of cheaply made, lead-painted junk (no offense). The basic Thingmaker sets came with an open-faced oven, a cooling pan, tongs, plastigoop, metal molds and a few little accessories like paints, feathers or other adornments. How were all of these items married so that they produced rubber bugs, shunken heads, and other wonderful things? Tongs go into the side of the mold, plastigoop goes into the mold, mold goes into the hot oven, mold comes out of the hot oven into the water.
If you did everything right, you had a nice, dry, rubbery replica of the mold, sort of like the chemical set version of an Easy Bake oven, if only marginally less tasty. If you undercooked the piece then you ended up with a toxic, sticky ball of goo. If you overcooked the piece, you had to get a knife or needle and start digging the stubborn goop out of the mold. If you cooked the mold the right amount of time, but were greedy and didn't let it cool long enough, you would get burnt.
Can you guess why I knew I'd never get a Thingmaker for Christmas?
But the toys were extremely popular way back when, and quite a number of spin-off sets were produced, including:
- Creepy Crawlers -- the original toy to fall under the category line of 'Thingmaker.' It contained molds for a surprisingly large variety of creatures, and even included small clear-plastic wings to attach to the flying insects. An offshoot of this was the Giant Creepy Crawlers set, which featured larger insects, one to a mold (whereas the previous set's molds allowed the creation of two smaller creepies at once).
- Fright Factory -- a charmingly digusting set which allowed kids to create 'scary' items such as little skeletons, shrunken heads, and even vampire teeth to wear to school, the dentist's office, etc.
- Creeple Peeple -- a set for producing weird little creatures (like Gumby as drawn by Salvador Dali), complete with arms and legs, that one could stick on a pencil to make little figures.
- Fun Flowers - this being the 1960's, kids could make their own little plastic flowers in a variety of designs and colors.
- Fighting Men - for producing little plastic toy soldiers. Actually one of the more innovative sets, this one allowed to kids to also create little weapons and accessories for their very GI Joe-like little warriors.
Back to the Thingmaker: At a garage sale when I was a teenager, I found an old Thingmaker set for sale, for a dollar, and I was overjoyed. I took it home, set it up, and discovered that all the plasticgoop bottles had dried out (or set up, or cured, or whatever you wanna call it). Talk about a major bummer. Not that this stopped me from poking around in the bottles with a knife and seeing if I could rejuvenate it somehow, but no dice. I'm sure I threw it out in disgust, and I'll bet that if I'd kept the box (it was in the original box, with all the original parts and instructions), I could sell it on ebay for a tidy profit. How times do change.
Tomorrow: Christmas presents I actually did get (whether or not I wanted them at the time)!
I was just telling Onnie at lunch about my one particular memory of something I wanted for Christmas but didn’t get. Not a big letdown, as it turned out, but still. I wanted a Holly Hobbit desk set. You know what I’m talking about? The desk pad with the decor on the sides, the cup holder, the pen set, the clip tray. All matching, of course, in Holly Hobbit-ness, and all shiny and new. I can see it now, on the top of the page in the Sears Catalog. (I’m sure Mom didn’t much appreciate that catalog, as it gave us a wish list only about 400 pages long.) Anyway, the desk set: it was the newness of it, the way it all matched. I didn’t care much for Holly Hobby per se, but it looked so nice on that desk, so organized and pretty. This all says a lot about my personality, as Onnie pointed out to me. Well, duh! I love it organized and pretty. What can I say?
Come to think of it, the other things I vaguely remember wanting were things that were clean and neat, too. Like a snoopy bed set, all pressed neatly with matching bed ruffle and sham. And Barbie stuff, which is par for the course.
I grew up in a house where almost nothing matched. Okay, nothing matched. Most things were “gently used” when we got them. Not that I’m complaining. I just think it exaggerated my desire for clean, matching things. But I was already working with that tendency …
Colyn (Email) - 20 12 07 - 15:32
Hey, it’s almost Christmas 2008, are you gonna update the site?
onnie (Email) - 20 11 08 - 16:56
