I suspect most people can recall one special Christmas — the Christmas when they received a present so cool, so amazing that it could only be the Best. Christmas. Present. Ever.
For Ralphie Parker, the hero of “A Christmas Story,” it was a Red Ryder carbine-action 200-shot Range Model air rifle BB gun with a compass in the stock and a thing that tells time. I’m still not sure about the “thing.” A clock? A sundial?
For me, it was the Christmas of 1982, when I received my Atari 2600 game console. OK, yeah, what I’d really wanted was a state-of-the-art ColecoVision game system. But it was more expensive than the Atari, and money was tight. Besides, it wasn’t as if any of my friends had a ColecoVision, anyway.
They all had 2600s, too. Except for the ones who had Mattel’s Intelevision system or Magnavox’s Odyssey2.
Actually, I don’t know anyone who owned an Odyssey2. But I do remember the floor model that mostly gathered dust at the local Otasco store.
Before the Christmas of the Atari, my best present ever had been a Mego brand Batmobile with Batman and Robin action figures. That must have been about 1975. Obviously, in just seven years, my requirements for a satisfactory Christmas present had gotten a lot more stringent.
Christmas ’77 would have been a great Christmas if the first batch of “Star Wars” toys had arrived on time. George Lucas was smart enough to keep all of the licensing rights to his movies, but not smart enough to get the toys into stories in time for the holidays. But maybe some children actually had fun playing with their Early Bird Gift Certificates, which were basically IOUs for action figures.
Some children this year will get MP3 players that have more processing power than my first game system did. It’s easy to forget, especially when the economy is in the dumps, but we’re a lot wealthier as a nation now than we were just 30 years ago.
In the early ’80s, William Shatner appeared in ads extolling the Commodore Vic-20 — “the wonder computer of the 1980s” — which cost “under $300.” The wristwatch I’m wearing now is smarter than a Vic-20, and for about $300 I can buy a decent desktop PC.
Each new Christmas brings rising expectations. I was once happy to get this thing called a “turntable” on which I placed a large, wax disk called a “record album.” When spun on the turntable, the album would play music, along with assorted hisses, pops and crackles.
Today, I’d insist that Santa Claus bring me an iPod that could hold thousands of songs. And, no, a Zune would not be a reasonable substitute.
But even with rising expectations, you reach a point when nostalgia trumps all else. I’ve received better, more advanced Christmas gifts since that Atari 2600, but none that can top it as my best gift ever. After a certain age, Christmas loses something, and not just because children stop believing in Santa. I suspect it’s when puberty hits, and suddenly you have more important things on your mind — like girls or boys or whatever — than what’s under the tree.
That’s when Christmas goes into a time capsule, waiting to be opened only when you have children of your own. And the memories in that capsule can’t be surpassed.
Lexus is running a TV advertisement in which a young child talks excitedly about how his new Big Wheel is the greatest Christmas present ever — at least until the ad shifts to the same child, now an adult, staring starry-eyed at a new Lexus in his driveway.
No one has ever given me a car for Christmas, so I’m not exactly certain how I would react. But, somehow, I think it wouldn’t top a Big Wheel. Or an Atari.
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