What Did You Want For Christmas As A Kid, But Did Not Receive?

What was that gift that you always wanted as a kid?  Rock’em Sock’em Robots?  Stretch Armstrong?  Creepy Crawler Thingmaker, an Atari Game System?  Each year we were thrilled to see the Sears catalog come in the mail.  No, we didn’t have internet to browse all of the toy sites and dept store sites.  No Cyber Monday, no Black Friday, here is the catalog, otherwise known as “The Wish Book”.  For days before Christmas we would scour this book eagerly circling the items that we had an interest in. 

By the end of the season, the catalog could have easily been listed on the NY Times Best Seller list and it had become a tattered mess of ripped, wrinkled, and tattered pages.  But no matter, the requests were in.  Santa knew what we wanted because we reinforced our requests in letter form as well. 

With our requests, we often heard the phrase “You’ll just tear it up”.  Yes we probably would, but that is beside the point.  That’s what kids do, they tear things up.  For years I wanted an electric race track, one of the big ones that came with a couple of miles of track.  The Wish Book had many different models with different lengths of track.  I wasn’t greedy; I picked a moderate length of track right in the middle.  My much older brother had gotten one years before and had certainly “torn it up”, therefore I would tear it up too.  

Also, as I got older, around 16 or 17, the Nintendo Entertainment System was the hot item for a couple of Christmases.  The request for the games system fell on deaf ears.  The parent’s excuse for not getting this one was “You guys spend enough time in front of the boob tube as it is, why would you get something that would allow you to spend even more time?”  Well, they were right, in retrospect, but it was a pretty crappy excuse at the time.

What gift did you want when you were a kid?  Do you remember?  Did you buy it out of spite after you moved out of the house?  What gift items are you tell your kids no to now?  Feel free to comment here or post a comment on our Facebook page atwww.facebook.com/oldiez961.com