My Favorite Christmas Presents

Okay, let’s take a break from all the lengthy lists of Christmas songs and focus on the true reason for the season, the heart and soul of the holidays: THE ACQUISITION OF MATERIAL POSSESSIONS! WOOHOOO!!! But seriously, we were all selfish little brats as kids, and deep down we sort of still are. Ravenously shredding your way through paper armor to get at the succulent innards, getting that one precious toy you wanted or being blindsided by something you didn’t KNOW you wanted, that experience leaves an impact. It’s not as if Christmas was the only point in my childhood where I ever received things from others, but the pomp and circumstance of the holiday made the act of getting something for Christmas WAY more special than any other time. After all, it’s not like anyone dragged a pine tree into our living room for my birthday.  So let’s dig through my greedy, materialistic memories and see what STUFF over the years I best remember getting.

To at least BEGIN with something related to the whole “anime comics” thing, let’s talk about the first anime I ever owned. I think it was the Christmas of 2000 when I received a pair of anime on glorious VHS: Princess Mononoke and Sonic The Hedgehog. Because when I think of two animated works that are ABSOLUTELY of equal artistic merit and worthy of mention in the same breath, it’s Hayao Miiyazaki’s big screen medieval fantasy epic and a pair of video game cash-in OVAs edited together to look like a feature. But seriously, you need to remember that this was the tail end of an era when anime was rare and expensive and only available at the back of really sketchy stores and somehow cost MORE if you wanted it NOT dubbed into English. At least, that was still the case out in the boonies, where I lived at the time (and we had to walk two hundred miles barefoot in the snow, uphill both ways, to get to the nearest Suncoast). Actually having any anime in my own physical possession felt like I’d MAJORLY leveled up my otaku stats, especially since both anime were so obviously of equal quality and artistic value. I joke, but what’s REALLY funny is that I’ve probably gone back and watched Sonic MORE than Mononoke, if only because it requires less of a time & energy investment. Oh, and in an attempt to fake me out, the Sonic tape was inside of a leather zip-up Bible case. Somebody somewhere thinks that’s really blasphemous, while somebody else thinks it would be blasphemous NOT to do that.

Another good nerdy Christmas memory was when I finally got a copy of Final Fantasy VII. I was a bit late to the party when Final Fantasy became a thing. I remember I tried out that demo they released with Tobal no. 1, and had absolutely no idea what I was doing. It wasn’t until after I’d finally gotten around to playing Super Mario RPG that I had any interest in finally seeing what FF7 was really all about. As luck would have it, the tiny little local video store in the town we’d just moved to had a copy, and they even loaned out the Official Strategy Guide with it, so I actually had some clue what I was doing! Good thing, too, because it quickly turned out that I’m one of THOSE gamers who has to poke around each and every corner of each and every screen in an RPG, so it took me ages to make any progress. Way longer than the weekend one rental lasted. As a result, I rented the everlovin’ heck out of FF7. In fact added up, those rental fees probably would have covered the cost of buying at LEAST a used copy of FF7. The rest of my family clearly thought so, since they gave me a copy that Christmas.

The best thing, though, was that we actually went to the video store to pick up some stuff for the holiday weekend, and I ALMOST rented FF7 again. Hey, we’re on Christmas break, what better time to make some serious progress on the game, right? Well, as soon as I picked the case off the shelf, I could see my Mom and Sister out of the corner of my eye, looking at each other and trying hard not to laugh. Now, I am infamously bad at reading my surroundings. Seriously, I’m the easiest person in the world to throw a surprise party for, I question NOTHING. So it was a rare triumph of awareness when I actually noticed their reaction and pieced together what it meant. And in an even MORE atypically smooth move, I managed to make up some excuse about not wanting to play something so time-consuming when there was so much holiday craziness to deal with, and it was convincing enough for them to not realize I’D realized anything. Not that I minded having a present spoiled, of course, I was just happy to get my own copy of FF7 a day or two later… even if I DID have to start figuring things out on my own now that I didn’t have a complimentary strategy guide to hold my hand. Of course, the REALLY funny thing would have been if I’d completely misread the situation and they got me something else entirely. Like, a golf game or some really dry, complicated strategy thing I totally don't care about. THAT’D teach me to actually pay attention to my surroundings for once!

But this was still in my teenage years. If you REALLY wanna talk about fun Christmas morning memories, you of course gotta go back to early childhood. Not only does every single present feel a MILLION times bigger (both figuratively and literally) back when you’re little, but the parents make that much more of a deal over it as well. At least, MY parents were really big on the whole “let’s stay up all Christmas Eve Night to set up something really impressive for next morning” routine. Ya know, instead of just having stuff to unwrap, there’s this one big, impressive thing already out and set up and dominating the whole living room. Well, as big and impressive our meager finances could accommodate at the time. Our house when I was a kid had this one hallway that sort of separated the bedrooms in the back half from the more “public” rooms up front, and the door between hallway and living room was pretty much always kept open for easy passage. Christmas Morning is one of the few times I can remember that door being kept shut, and that sight was always EXTRA exciting since we knew that meant something reeeaaally special was all laid out on the other side.

There was some fairly standard stuff over the years, like one Christmas me and my sister had new bikes parked right by the front door, or when the Playmates Star Trek toys came out they had the ships all set up and on display in the floor. One year they even got a few of those big (well, they SEEMED big at the time) Fisher-Price plastic kitchen playsets all set up, so for just one day the living room was our own little private house. Fun times. I think one of the neatest memories in retrospect, though, was Matchbox Motorcity. We had a TON of Hot Wheels and Matchbox toys back in the day, and one Christmas my parents got us this big roadway playset for ‘em. Now, you gotta understand, I’m not talking about one of those big placemat/small rug things with a picture of some roads printed on it. And I’m also not talking about one of those single-chunk buildings or plastic diorama things that are only a few feet across.  Motorcity was a big box full of plastic road pieces that you could string together in any pattern you wanted, and the night before, my folks had used every single solitary piece to string together a whole Interstate across our living room floor. It made for quite the visual impact, and that alone would have been enough for it to stand out among my Christmas memories. However, an even better detail only hit me in retrospect: they didn’t HAVE to set anything up at all.

This wasn’t one of those situations where you had to put in batteries or apply lots of tiny stickers to things or construct something according to really complicated instructions or anything like that before us kids could play with it. Obviously those are gifts where you really do HAVE to set it up in advance the night before, since your whiny brat of a kid won’t have the patience for you to do it in front of them on Christmas Morning. But Motorcity? That was just a bunch of slabs of plastic, ready to go straight out of the box. If anything, putting the pieces together was part of the appeal, so we wouldn’t have complained about doing it ourselves. But no. They literally went through all the trouble of laying the whole thing out JUST for the sake of creating that moment of us kids coming in and seeing it all. Just the thought of that is pretty sweet. Oh, and if that’s not saccharine enough for ya, how about this: while stuff like the Fisher-Price playsets and the little-kid bikes have been lone gone for years, we actually STILL HAVE most of those Motorcity pieces. I regularly see my sister’s kids playing with that stuff now, and they’re at about the same age we were when we got them in the first place. Insert “awwwww” here.

But who am I kidding? If I was a child at any point in The Eighties, then there’s only one thing that’s legally allowed to top the list of best Christmas presents: VIDEO GAMES. Come on, I blew two whole paragraphs on the time I got Final Fantasy VII, you didn’t REALLY something as trivial as my parents staying up all night solely to create a happy memory for their kids was going to beat out the almighty Nintendo, did you? Now, as with many things, my family was a bit late to the video game train. I was introduced to vidja games through visits to various relatives’ houses and numerous displays at Toys R Us. But that couldn’t tide us over forever, and one glorious Christmas Morning in 1991, it happened. They had the door to the living room closed again, so we knew SOMETHING special was brewing, but in this case there was an extra bit of excitement. Even though the door was closed, we could hear something. Music. Not Christmas music, but what I’d eventually come to recognize as the World 1 overworld music from Super Mario Bros 3. Yep, we finally got our very own Nintendo Entertainment System, complete with copies od Mario 3 and Big Bird's Hide & Speak, two works I’m sure you’ll all agree are EVERY BIT as equal in historical importance and artistic achievement as Princess Mononoke and Sonic The Movie. There was much rejoicing.

Now, this is obviously a big ol’ Christmas memory for me because it was the first of many, MANY video game systems I’d play to death over the following decades. But aside from the path of geeky destruction it’d send me down, getting the NES also stands out to me as a Christmas memory just for what a singular moment it was. As best as I can remember, that Christmas Morning with the NES on the living room TV was the only time we EVER had a game system set up in there. Every other system we got afterwards was kept on a dedicated TV in the back, so that image of the NES on “the nice TV” was retroactively enshrined as one of those magical things that only The Power Of Christmas could ever achieve. Also, despite all the other systems we’d acquire over the years, I’m pretty sure that NES was the ONLY ONE anybody actually got for Christmas. I think every other one was a birthday present or a hand-me-down from someone else or a random “just ‘cos splurge” (remind me to tell the tale of us getting our Super Nintendo one day). The fact that the memory of our first ever video game system ALSO happened to be the only one enshrined in Christmas finery just makes that memory all the more impactful. The only exception I can think of was the year I got a game Boy Advance SP, that was the square one with the flip screen instead of a purple rectangle with the buttons on the side. And wouldn’t you know it, mine was the special edition… PAINTED UP TO LOOK LIKE AN NES. So there you have it, the Nintendo Entertainment System is the official video game system of Christmas, and I have to officially acknowledge it as my favorite present ever. Until somebody gives me flying car this year.  RIGHT?