THE TWELVE YEARS OF CHRISTMAS: YEAR TWELVE

1984
About the time some of my buddys were starting to "go with" girls, I was opening a GoBot Command Center in my two-year-old Tron pajamas. Back at school my friends mercilessly informed me that sixth grade was past the natural cut-off point for getting toys on Christmas. I responded by asking for a remote control Voltron in seventh grade (which I scored, thank you very much). Oh, and are you judging me because I was into GoBots and not the beloved Transformers? In my experience, trying to actually play out a storyline with the Transformers is near impossible due to their complexity. It went something like this..
"Hey everyone, we must transform and defend against the Autobot invasion!"
Fifteen minutes later I've got 'em all looking like earth vehicles (and one giant tape deck) but during the process I was pulled so far out of the action mentally that I couldn't remember what anyone was supposed to be doing. Plus, I'd grown hungry for a snack.
Gobots may be elementary, but they were fast. There, I said it.

Anyway, having seen a peek at all the childhood Christmases of my life.. what have we learned?
-I had the same haircut from birth to age eleven (at least).
-My parents chose to buy us cool gifts instead of new carpet.
-I'm a huge nerd.
-I've effectively alienated the bulk of my readership.
-I might have been better off if the Grinch would have stolen at least one of my Christmases because I was obviously toy-obsessed. In that sense it's probably best that we only get nine or ten "optimal childhood Christmas mornings." Because once those are out of the way we may get a chance to experience the true joys of Christmas.

"God bless us, every one."
Merry Christmas!

THE TWELVE YEARS OF CHRISTMAS: YEAR ELEVEN

1983
No, that photo wasn't taken in a local video arcade, that was actually in my living room.
You must have been fooled by the Arcade Style graphics of Donkey Kong Junior. My folks, bless them, decided to feed my video game obsession once again with a ColecoVision. The controller was rubbish, but the games seemed light years beyond my old fashioned Atari, which was in fact obsolete with ColecoVision's special adaptor that allowed you to play Atari games (which I never actually got). Donkey Kong came with the system, so I had the whole ape family. In the coming months I managed to score Space Fury, Smurf, Dragonfire, Q-Bert and so on. Of all my old consoles ColecoVision is the only one that no longer works which is pretty upsetting because I could really go for a round of Cabbage Patch Kid right this second.
(Also note in photo: Jabba the Hut pajamas, mail away exclusive "M Network" Tron joystick for Atari, and the Little Tikes kitchenette which was secretly as exciting as the Coleco was.)

THE TWELVE YEARS OF CHRISTMAS: YEAR TEN

1982
My sister and I were forced to wait in the hallway as my mom sat in the living room and struggled to load the camera. It was taking forever and I kept threatening to peek around the corner to get a look at the Christmas spread. My mom's fumbling took too long and I secretly made good on my threat by popping my head out for literally a split second.
"What did you see?" my sister asked.
"I don't know." was all I could say because I truly did not know what I had just witnessed. It was like the living room had a new wall and my favorite movies were on it. Once we got permission to advance it still took me a minute to understand what I was staring at. Oh, they were movie posters like the ones at the theater! The fact that they were mounted and could therefore stand on their own had thrown me. They had looked so much smaller when they hung outside of the cinema. These had swallowed the living room! And they were glorious.
The Empire one had belonged to me prior to Christmas because I'd gotten it for signing up with the Star Wars Fan Club. However, I had only been allowed to unroll it a couple times.
Interestingly, a few days before Christmas I recounted a dream to my dad in which my parents had re-gifted me something that I already owned. Obviously, the force was strong with me.
The other two posters were obtained from the local movie theater. My folks just asked and they handed them over free of charge. (They actually got three there. I would receive The Dark Crystal a month later on my birthday.)
These masterworks have followed me around all my life, and they've just gotten cooler with age.
Boy, am I glad my folks decided to ignore my Christmas list that year.

TWELVE YEARS OF CHRISTMAS: YEAR NINE

1981
Suddenly everything changed. I realize I was out of my mind with excitement, but that smug look on my face is begging for a slapping. I remember thinking that the cartridges where way smaller than I expected (I called them "tapes" for the longest time). I remember my parents playing two-man Space Invaders almost as much as I did during those first weeks. I remember wishing we had a second television.

TWELVE YEARS OF CHRISTMAS: YEAR EIGHT

1980
Again with the Star Wars! This time it was the cheapo Sears exclusive Cloud City set. And that's a Smokey and the Bandit style Trans Am by my foot. A few weeks before this photo was taken my folks were hosting a Christmas party attended by college students. I casually walked into the living room wearing those Spider-Man pajamas and the whole place erupted with boisterous laughter. It took me a while to realize that I was the source of the comedy and I didn't know whether to be proud or embarrassed. Decades later I was not even considered for Sam Raimi's Spider-Man film.

TWELVE YEARS OF CHRISTMAS: YEAR SEVEN

1979
Once you go Star Wars there's no turning back. Christmas 79 proved to be a great victory for the Rebel Alliance. They finally got a headquarters... the Millennium Falcon. (Also note: Darth Vader head slipper and the same Superman pajamas from two years earlier.)

TWELVE YEARS OF CHRISTMAS: YEAR SIX

1978
This photo is deceiving because I didn't get all of that stuff in one haul. What you see was the entire Star Wars collection that I had been amassing for a year (though a great year I must say). I was presented with the Death Star on that Christmas morning of 78, and that evening I carted it back to my bedroom and set it up on the floor in the designated Star Wars section. It remained there on my carpet as the next two sequels hit theaters and the population of my Star Wars Land skyrocketed. Frequent play finally ceased about a year after Jedi left the cinema. At that point the toy became more of a display piece but it continued to be a highlight of my bedroom décor. In 1988 I gave my bedroom a complete teenage overhaul and the Death Star playset was re-boxed for the first time in roughly a decade. Soon I'll carry it in from the garage and set it up for my son.

TWELVE YEARS OF CHRISTMAS: YEAR FIVE

1977
The Red Baron velcro-wrapped ball game, the magnetic alphabet and even my sister's pink phone were all fun, but this was the year I received one of my all time greatest Christmas presents. No, it wasn't a Star Wars "early bird" pack of action figures or even a voucher box for them. (Those wouldn't come to town until early Spring.) I got an amazingly fun game called Chutes Away!


It played remarkably like an arcade game. It's control console and view through the eyepiece foreshadowed video games like 1942 and its subsequent copycats. The artwork on the rotating playing field was captivating and I studied it during my gaming breaks. It depicted a treacherous land populated by stranded survivors who had suffered a variety of distinctive calamities...

No wonder I like the show Lost so much.

More on Chutes Away! here and here.

TWELVE YEARS OF CHRISTMAS: YEAR FOUR

1976
By then Christmas had blossomed into an entire season full of activities and events. I counted down the days on that pop-up advent calendar you can see on the left. Not even my new, bald sibling could keep us from our yuletide tinkery. That year we made tree ornaments (from a kit), baked and frosted my first sugar cookies and created a dollhouse diorama of a winter scene.
In the photo I'm opening Mr. Potato Head. (Classic!) The purple box at my feet contained a puzzle depicting an illustrated zoo with many monkeys on the loose. Oh the countless hours I invested... Wow, I just realized that this has to be painfully boring to read, meanwhile I'm sitting here welling up with bittersweet excitement as the comfort of childhood overflows in my brain like an expanding pillow. Well, I'll just wrap things up here so that I can go wallow in my own gooey sentimentality for a time.

TWELVE YEARS OF CHRISTMAS: YEAR THREE

1975
Ah, it finally happened. My brain had developed enough for me to fully embrace Christmas. When you're almost three there's no mistaking that something wonderful and unusual is happening, but you still have no clue that it's an annual event or what the words 'annual' or 'event' even mean. In the photo above my plastic motorcycle is parked in the state of Florida at my grandma's house which was less than an hour away from Disney World (thus the stuffed Pluto). Yes, as if Christmas morning weren't enough, I had gotten my first taste of Disney just a few days prior. Actually, a double dosage of magic like that could be considered a cruel thing to do to a child. I wonder how long it took me to realize that the rest of my life wouldn't carry on quite like it was going that week.
Note my little setup on the floor. I had been bulldozing Christmas candy right in front of the manger. Now that I think of it, that's just about the perfect metaphor for the way Christmas is perceived in the mind of a three-year-old.

TWELVE YEARS OF CHRISTMAS: YEAR TWO

1974
A single Christmas morning can change everything. One day you're incapable of launching blue ping pong balls at anything and the very next day you're fully equipped to do just that. It was actually Tupperware that produced the wonderful gadget I'm holding in the photo. It's as though some Tupperware exec called a meeting and said.. "Everyone is aware that we've mastered the art of keeping air away from food, now let us put that same air to work! Let's really show it who's boss by forcing it to do something ridiculous.. launching little plastic balls! Gentlemen we are truly the masters of air."
It took me years to figure out that the thing wasn't just a wonderful gun, and that it was intended to be a game of 'catch.'
Over time it would prove to be so much more..
-Unscrew the red thing and you can yell through the yellow part like a megaphone.
-Fill the red part with water and one squeeze has massive drenching power.
-Wear yellow part on head for comic effect.
-Squeeze the red thing, place the open end on human flesh, release and hold. One minute later you're wearing a perfect, circular hickey.

Merry Christmas Tupperware! May your patented 'burping seal' live on.

TWELVE YEARS OF CHRISTMAS: YEAR ONE

If you think about it, we humans really only get about nine or ten optimal childhood Christmases. You hardly know what's going on when you're one and two years old, so it doesn't really kick in until age three (if you're lucky). On the upper end Christmas starts feeling sort of different as early as age eleven. And by twelve if you find toys under the tree you'd best keep your mouth shut about them on the day you return to school. Ten Christmases isn't much. So if you get the flu one year and the next year burglars steal your presents (like they did on that episode of Growing Pains) then you're looking at a loss of roughly one fifth of your Childhood Christmas Wonder.
Thankfully, I grew up with every ounce of potential Christmas joy intact. For me it was just as Jean Shepherd put it in A Christmas Story, it was "Lovely, glorious, beautiful Christmas.. around which the entire kid year revolved." So I thought I'd showcase my own collection of childhood Christmases over the next twelve posts, one photo from each year spanning from 1973 to 1984.

1973
I was only eleven months old, but I could poke a doll in the eye with the best of 'em. As you would expect, there's little for me to reminisce about regarding that year. I do know that the doll was handmade by my great grandmother. It was a Kirk Doll, which is to say it was a doll made in my likeness, yet sewn without any visual reference. And it wore a sailor suit. Life is full of concepts that are difficult to learn, but I can't imagine what takes place in the mind of a child when a parent holds up a rag doll wearing Naval garb and says repeatedly "This is you."