Christmas gifts throughout the years
- col-dave-mast
- December 24, 2024
- 83
Christmas gift giving over the years has been anything but stable.
As a kid we revered Christmas morning like it was the need-all, be-all of everything, racing downstairs, jumping on Mom and Dad, shouting and screaming for them to get up at 5:41 a.m., eager to tear into our bevy of gifts.
Over the decades Christmas gifts change dramatically, and how we perceive them is a true miracle of Christmas, for instance:
Christmas 1971
Christmas was about slinging shiny strands of silver on the tree. Little did we know the tinsel we were lofting into every nook and cranny of the tree was filled with dangerous lead and was horrible for us in so many ways.
All we knew as little kids was it made the tree sparkle like crazy, which was good enough for us, and it made the train set, Tinker Toys, board games and everything else look all the more inviting.
Christmas 1975
Christmas started getting really good at this point, with gifts like a lavish all-blue baseball mitt and a racy Hornet banana seat bicycle. I may or may not have taken that racy part too seriously and suffered a few mishaps over the next couple of years, but hey, I was a boy growing up in the country, and that’s what boys do. Best of all was that awesome Mattel hand-held football game I worked like a boss.
Christmas 1982
Now it was all about music, with Hall & Oates joining me for the holidays. OK, it was that and finding something perfect for the love of my life, one Ann Kandel. She actually bought me a watch I still have today. What I bought her were plenty of Precious Moments, and I don’t mean that in the “aww, isn’t that cute” way, but actual Precious Moments figurines.
Christmas 1993
Wow, this is new. What do you get an infant child for Christmas? I think my wife and I both viewed Neil, our first child, as a gift more worthy than anything we could buy. It was weird wrapping up rattles, teething toys, soft-covered books featuring only colorful pictures and things that spun in circles nonstop over Neil’s head in the crib.
Christmas 2000
Married with children, Neil, 7, Alec, 5, and Kyle, too young to even realize what those things under the tree he was getting for Christmas were, when the box was as fun to play with as the toy inside.
Shopping for kids is so much more enjoyable than shopping for adults. Kids ‘R’ Us made Christmas shopping way too easy — endless aisles of toys, Lego building blocks, Star Wars action figures and football jerseys of NFL greats like Jerry Rice, Brett Favre and Emmitt Smith.
Shopping was so simple back then.
Christmas 2006
Things on wheels that jingle and jangle, plush stuffed animals, and GI Joe are a thing of the past. Now it’s all about the electronics, with the likes of Game Boys and Nintendo and games featuring Super Smash Bros., Sonic and Mario. Also in are music electronics so small the kids could hide them in their pockets and download music off LimeWire.
Shopping for three growing boys over the years was fairly simple, outside of the one thing they asked for year after year that was denied by their mean mother, that being a puppy, which to this day has never been an option under the tree for our children.
Christmas 2022
Shopping is no longer going to the mall or out to visit 84 different stores to find a perfect gift. Now everything is online, and the kids simply order their own gifts and have them sent to our house for us to wrap so they can feign surprise on Christmas morning.
Not quite the same joy it once brought, but at least we know the clothes will fit.
Christmas 2024
Today, shopping is easy. Someone once said money is an impersonable gift. I say nay, it is the one thing I know I can give my adult kids they will truly appreciate. I say throw sentimentality right out the window and give them something they can really use.
Cold, hard cash.
People might say it’s better to give them something meaningful, but in my mind, cash is as meaningful as it comes, and I’ve never seen anyone turn down their nose when offered.
Anyway, my kids ask me what I want for Christmas. Then they ask me what Mom wants for Christmas.
We both want the same thing: just come home for the holidays and spend time with us. Let us bask in the joy of being a loving family for a few days. Let’s play games, lounge around watching Linus bring tears to our eyes, pound down some awesome cooking, and simply allow the warmth of love and appreciation of being together be enough.
Gifts are just that, gifts, and some day they will be gone and forgotten — yes, even my glorious gift of cash will disappear and probably all too soon.
But the memory of just being a family unit again, to reminisce, to look ahead and to embrace something that means more than purchased gifts, because of the one gift that means more than any other, the one that lasts forever, that being the gift of everlasting life brought to us through a tiny baby in a manger.
Because in the end, that is the one gift I want to share with my family that means the most to me, the gift of Jesus, that doesn’t come wrapped in sparkly paper with a shiny bow, but a gift that outlasts all others.
That’s enough for me, but it sure is fun to reminisce about toys of yore, both from my childhood and my children’s as well.
Epilogue: I still have that Mattel football game!