Best present you got as a kid

What was the best present you ever got as a kid?

Mine is not just one, but many over the years. My favorite would have to be the Atari 2600 with the bundled PacMan game. Yeah, the Pac-Man for the Atari was horrible, but I didn’t know (or care) that at the time. I LOVED it.

The tradition was to go to my Mom’s parents after opening gifts at home. That year, I did NOT want to go, I wanted to play video games all day long. Hey, it was video games without popping in a quarter every sixty seconds! My parents allowed me to bring the game console to Grandma’s, and everyone there ended up playing Combat for hours. It was a blast!

A few years earlier, I got a Millennium Falcon, the big Keener one. That was the hot gift that year, and they were very hard to find. But somehow, my parents got it. A friend named Kenny, who lived across the street, had WAY more Star Wars figures and spaceships than I did. But HE didn’t get the Falcon, and it about killed him. He tried trading me a ton of stuff for it, but I would have none of it. It was ALL mine! What’s left of it (the shell basically) is still in my parents basement somewhere. I saw it down there a couple years ago. They built them to last back then!

 
Me in my Cowboy Hat and my bike

A Huffy bike and a cowboy hat was another gift around the same time. Maybe the year before. I had had hand-me-down used bikes up until that time, but this white and blue bike was brand new and all mine! There was a lot of snow and ice that Christmas morning, but that didn’t stop me from taking it out for an hour to break it in. MAN was I cold, but my black Cowboy hat kept me somewhat warm. Or so I told myself.

The following year, I ditched the dirt bike for a 10 speed. As an aside, in the picture above (yes, that is me on the bike!) notice the Christmas tree. My parents had twelve feet of hight in the room, so my dad decided to get a HUGE tree that year. So we get it home, and it won’t fit standing up! So what does my dad do? Rather than cutting the bottom of the tree, he cuts off the top! The entire family STILL talks about the year we had a Christmas tree that went from the floor to the ceiling and spread out! It was too funny.

(Oh, and yes, I was a blond until the age of 13)

The year after the Atari 2600, I got a table-top Donkey Kong game. That is, as far as I know, the only present that I still have to this day, and it works just like it did when it was new! I liked the game, but the sounds it made (DONG-DONG-TWANG-DONG-TWANG) was simply too annoying to put up with long, and it was shelved by March. And there it sat, until a few years ago when I was helping my Dad move an old washing machine out of the basement. The one I got (Coleco) came with rechargeable C batteries, and I was amazed to discover that after all these years, they would still take a charge and worked fine. Again, they built them to last back then!

When I was 17, CDs became the big thing. (1987.) I really wanted one, but my part-time job would not allow me to get one. But ABC Warehouse in Kalamazoo had a special sale on them. So my parents, on or around the middle or November, sent me to buy the Pioneer Single Tray CD Player, but I could not have it until Christmas morning. That really sucked. I picked that up, as well as the Pyromania CD from Def Leppard. They did let me unbox and connect the CD Player when I first got it home to make sure it worked, and I rocked out to the song Photograph before unhooking it and putting it back in its cardboard cocoon for six weeks. In that time, I picked up three more CDs, all of which I drooled over until Christmas day.

So what presents do you have the most fond memories of? As an adult, Christmas presents for me is all about those which I give my family, especially the kids. I look forward to watching them open presents more than I enjoyed opening my own when I was a kid myself.

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