Memories of Xmas Loot

In my youthful years, the official kickoff of the Christmas Season was not the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade, or when radio stations started playing Christmas Music, or the airing of Frosty the Snowman on TV. Nor was it when Christmas lights started illuminating our neighborhood or when we decorated the tree.

No, for me, Christmas-time officially started when the JC Penney Catalog arrived...

Specifically, it arrived at my grandmother’s house. For some reason we did not receive one…but every year, like clockwork, that several hundred page tome landed at my grandmother’s doorstep like a golden brick, and man - IT WAS ON!

From there, my brother and I tore through those flimsy pages, searching for the toys section - pad and paper in hand - and started making THE LIST.

We would ambitiously draft down our desired Christmas gifts for Santa and others to provide - noting item number and page number on a piece of paper.

Deep down inside, we knew there was no hope of receiving 1/10th of the items we asked for…but Christmas is a time of hope. And thus we carefully reviewed our notes and handed the list to my Grandmother for processing. I can recall today how she would glance at the lines of scribble, make a slight face, and then tuck the list away, not to be discussed again.

And the miracle was - we got some of those items we requested!

Amazingly, someone archived all of those catalogs and put them online. Having recently discovered this, I toured through a few catalogs, reliving and reflecting on the amazing toys and devices that Santa and others brought to our home…

Some toys in our house just seemed omnipresent, like they had always been there. I can’t remember asking for them, nor who they were actually for - me, my brother, or my sister. But there they were, like the wallpaper or the carpet…eternally part of our lives. A big brand was Fisher Price, but Tonka definitely made its presence known. Other ‘learn how the world works’ toys drifted in and out like the tides - shopping baskets, phones, and the like:

Of course, being a young boy in the 70’s meant that I was destined to receive a fair amount of projectile launchers and military based playsets. The Nerf Rockets were a classic, always good to launch towards family members at inappropriate moments. I don’t recall asking for the Flying Aces Attack Carrier or Navarone Army Figure sets…but they made a memorable impact. The Carrier was so awesome, launching small styrofoam planes down the stairs - and they actually flew! And the Navarone mountain fortress - I recall coming downstairs to see that Santa had carefully set up hundreds of little green plastic army men in full assault on the Nazis, and I don’t think I was ever the same.

I’ve always had a fascination with World War II, but I’m not certain if these two toys were a reflection of that or a cause. But to this day I enjoy watching the classic movies Midway or the Guns of Navarone, and bask in the nostalgia of many afternoons recreating great battles, real and imagined.

The Big Loader Construction Set shown below taught me more about systems theory, engineering, and the need for careful planning than any college course I ever took. The Green Machine took the neighborhood by storm one Christmas, as all of us would take turns hauling ass down the street, yanking on the hand brake and trying to execute a perfect 360, often crashing and skinning a knee. It was the kind of toy that lawyers would prevent from getting released today, and it was friggin’ glorious.

Then one year Santa delivered the mother-lode - the Atari video game system. No other device soaked up more time or more creative energy. Eventually we had to dedicate a room in the house with its own TV to accommodate the constant gameplay.

But the real prize of any Christmas from 1977 onward was Star Wars. Every year, new and exotic plastic merchandise would appear, ready for galaxy adventures. The Death Star, the X-Wing, the Millennium Falcon, the Land Speeder, and all the figurines you could imagine. Looking back, we accumulated a small fortune in collectibles - had we preserved them. But no, those toys were well utilized. We played with and tortured them - built cities out of cardboard boxes, filmed stop-motion animation movies, placed them in treehouses, shot them with BB guns - or just posed them on our shelves. The Star Wars universe was our second back yard.

Special notice goes to the Chewbacca stuffed doll, which my brother received one Christmas. Unfortunately, it was lost in a New Year’s Eve house fire that I previously wrote about. My brother was devastated, but if I remember correctly my Grandparents replaced it, bless them.

But for me, personally, the champion toy archetype were the Legos. Each year I would eagerly await a new set or two, hoping for more raw material to fuel my imagination. The Space series shown below were a classic - I had nearly every one of these packages. Legos occupied me for hours at a time - in my room, on a card table, building space bases and castles and cities and naval vessels. We eventually accumulated a trunk load of Legos, enough to cover any building contingency. They are one of the reasons I studied engineering in college, and remain - if you will - the building blocks of my childhood.

Each Christmas we were truly fortunate. We wouldn’t get everything we wanted - but we got enough. We would run downstairs, see what Santa had brought, then open the family presents for more. Breakfast would be served, and then eventually we would be turned loose, running to our friend’s house down the street to see what Santa brought them.

I thank my parents, grandparents, friends, and family for being so generous to a geeky kid like me, and recognize the sheer privilege of having consistently happy holidays. We were not a well-off family in the grand scheme of things - but we felt rich every Christmas.

I hope you all can share in the joy of surprising a child with a magical new toy, one that opens up new worlds and nurtures a playful spirit.

Happy Holidays to all!

Parting Proclamation

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Disclaimer:

All content and opinions are solely those of the author (Jack), and not representative of my employer, former employers, anyone in Congress, my family, former college roommates, Baptists, the good citizens of Colorado, or my dog Mabel.