8992Tiger
Distinguished Member
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Ha ha. Not serious. Super cheesy song.
Most meaningful childhood Christmas present?
- Thread starter dcf2
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ChapelHillSooner
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Makes sense. Little embarrassed.
8992Tiger
Distinguished Member
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I feel ya. Tone is hard to read on a message board.Makes sense. Little embarrassed.
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Evacuate?
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Have two that stick out in my mind as memorable.
First was a bicycle (BMX) and remembering that there was a big snow on the ground and not being able to ride it outside for a few days, so I would ride it down our narrow little 15' hallway into the kitchen and back (had to pick it up and turn it around on each end) over and over. That got shut down after one side of the handlebars got into the side of the hall wall and tore a place in the wallpaper.
Second was this electric corded helicopter set that I loved. All it consisted of was a base for the helicopter and the helicopter was attached to the base by a small flimsy 3' or 4' wire rod, a wired hand controller and some scenery you could setup (trees, homes, people..) . All it did was go around in circles but you could control the speed (it would go crazy fast) and make it go up and down. I had it setup in my bedroom and was flying it a few days after Christmas when my dad opened up my bedroom door and the helicopter crashed right into it. I remember we just looked at each other in shock and knew it was toast. And it was toast and left a nice big place on the door. My dad spent days trying to fix it (he was handy) but there was no fixing it.
I'll add a bonus one that seemed like it was a bi-annual present - electric race track sets. They always had a piece of track break, car stop working or something go wrong with them. But I always looked forward to getting one of those.
First was a bicycle (BMX) and remembering that there was a big snow on the ground and not being able to ride it outside for a few days, so I would ride it down our narrow little 15' hallway into the kitchen and back (had to pick it up and turn it around on each end) over and over. That got shut down after one side of the handlebars got into the side of the hall wall and tore a place in the wallpaper.
Second was this electric corded helicopter set that I loved. All it consisted of was a base for the helicopter and the helicopter was attached to the base by a small flimsy 3' or 4' wire rod, a wired hand controller and some scenery you could setup (trees, homes, people..) . All it did was go around in circles but you could control the speed (it would go crazy fast) and make it go up and down. I had it setup in my bedroom and was flying it a few days after Christmas when my dad opened up my bedroom door and the helicopter crashed right into it. I remember we just looked at each other in shock and knew it was toast. And it was toast and left a nice big place on the door. My dad spent days trying to fix it (he was handy) but there was no fixing it.
I'll add a bonus one that seemed like it was a bi-annual present - electric race track sets. They always had a piece of track break, car stop working or something go wrong with them. But I always looked forward to getting one of those.
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A couple I remember as being very excited about. A pair of hockey skates so I didn’t have to rent those awful worn out figure skates at the ice rink anymore (the local ice rink was a real hotspot for the cool kids when I was in middle school.) And I got a purple Schwinn Varsity ten speed one year.
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One year for Christmas I got a pretty cool 4x4 RC truck. It looked a lot like Bigfoot (but wasn't Bigfoot branded).
At my house, Santa came overnight and I got Santa presents when I first woke up. Then my parents and I would have breakfast and then open our presents to each other (mostly my parents to me, but, you know). Then we'd get ready and go to my mom's parents' house for Christmas lunch & presents and then to my dad's parents' house for Christmas dinner & presents).
After we had opened our presents to each other, my mom went to get ready and my dad & I were looking at our presents. I wanted to play with my RC truck and so I started driving it around. At some point, we started driving the truck over the presents still piled under the tree. Over time, friction from the truck tires ended up tearing the paper in small places on most of the remaining presents, which my mom noticed when she came back to the living room and discovered what we were doing. My mom was not happy with us.
Dad and I had to fix the wrapping on a number of presents and completely rewrap a few of them. Fortunately, we got them done in time before we had to get ready and leave so my mom didn't lose all her Christmas spirit on us.
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That would have been quite the story to have to tell if you hadn't got the presents rewrapped in time and instead had to take them all gnarled up from a toy truck. Lol
Our cat did some damage to some presents one year. He must have used a few of them as a scratching post overnight/early morning, because they were ragged looking when we got to them (paper and boxes). And then he apparently decided that all the bows were placed in the wrong spots on the presents and removed all of them to locations throughout the house.
That was a lesson well learned for first time inside cat owners.
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CarolinaFever
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That's the same routine my family had for Christmas, except we would go to dad's sister's house for Christmas dinner.
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My favorite Christmas gift was a bicycle. Prior to receiving the bicycle, I did not know how to ride a bicycle. Prior to that Christmas, my mother, my brothers, and my sisters were dropping hints to me about what fun a bicycle could be. I agreed with them, but then gloomily (a) reminded them that I didn't know how to ride a bicycle and (b) reminded them that as clumsy and uncoordinated I was, I would probably never learn how to ride a bicycle. I genuinely believed that the reason I had never ridden a bicycle before that Christmas was because my parents understood how uncoordinated I was and didn't want to chance me hurting myself by trying to learn how. Well, I got a bicycle that Christmas. First thing I did was to examine it and see that Santa (I knew it was my father by then) had put it together wrong. But to not make my father feel bad, I just suggested that Santa must be very busy this time of year so we should excuse a few mistakes. I pretty quickly reassembled the bike correctly and then was faced with the prospect of actually riding the damn thing. The whole deal about the gyroscopic effect created by the spinning wheels was not something I understood at the time. It literally took me about 10 seconds to realize that once I got past a certain speed the bike was pretty much self-stabilizing. Once that happened, it was "Katy bar the door" and I was "off to the races." Not only one of the best gifts I ever received, but in terms of overcoming what I had previously assumed was an incapacitating lack of coordination, it was truly life changing. The scope of what I could do and where I could go expanded by an order of magnitude. And probably even more importantly, I was no longer the only boy my age who didn't know how to ride a bicycle.
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My kids had that set or something very similar.By reaction, this was my son’s favorite as a wee tot (and not something he could recall now):
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We had the Doug and Melissa version, thought most of the trains were Thomas courtesy of grandparents.
