I WANT TO EAT A NUT OF LAERMA!

THE GHOST OF A CHRISTMAS LONG PAST...

My mother actually bought a carton of Egg Nog today! Woo-hoo!



Today I have a shot of me that I believe was taken on Boxing Day in 1980 (as I'm wearing a different shirt from the ones I wore sitting under the tree), with my presents, which I will itemize since I know you all really care to know what they are:

There's the orginal Mattel Hot Wheels "Scorcher Chamber" set from 1980. This was a set with a special kind of Hot Wheels with a car, painted in Evel Knievel-esque colours, that had a friction "motor", where you pulled it back to wind up the internal spring and it would drive under its own power for 20 to 30 seconds or go and drive around the insides of a clear plastic "bowl". I think the challenge was to knock down all 4 "flags" to win.

There are several other normal Hot Wheels cars, including the Porsche 911 (one of my all-time favourite Hot Wheels when I was a kid) and a Greyhound Bus.

The yellowish rectangle is probably one of those self-contained pocket games from Tomy. I forget which one it was, but it was probably one of those with a wind-up timer that made an annoying buzz.

The stuffed toy with the blue raincoat and yellow hat is obviously Paddington Bear, my favourite stuffed toy of all, at least until I got a Garfield a couple of years later.

There's a Lego set. I forget which one that was, but the black background indicates that it probably was one of the space sets. There's another one behind it... could that been one of the Shell-branded service station sets?

There's something from Fisher-Price. Another, lesser, picture taken that Christmas reveals that one of my brothers got a Fisher-Price fire-engine set, but that one appears to be something else, like a van with a camper.

The tub was chocolate ice cream from the long-defunct Steinberg's supermarket chain, though it was probably empty and my mother was using it to store something, probably crayons or maybe Lego. God, Steinberg's went out of business around 1991 due to an internal family squabble and I still miss it. I can't even find the logo anywhere online, so I had to make an approximation of the Steinberg's logo from memory using Photoshop.

The house is the old townhouse we lived in on Elgin Crescent (though the front faced Alton Drive) in Beaconsfield before we moved to Pincourt.

posted by Steve Brandon @ 11:16 PM