I WANT TO EAT A NUT OF LAERMA!

THE GHOST OF A CHRISTMAS LONG PAST...

Another "Christmas morning" shot, this time taken with a Polaroid camera, hence the lower quality of the image. Since it's so small, I had to scan it at 450 dpi to get an image size roughly equivalent to the other photos, which I scan at 300 dpi¹.

I'm seen here playing with my new toy, a high-tech-looking (by 1979 standards) electronic "cash register", a cool toy for a budding young capitalist to play with. I remember liking it, especially since it had an LED display like the calculators of the time, but I also remember being a tad disappointed with it, as there was a spindle for a roll of paper and a reservoir for some blue ink, accesories which my mother never bought for me. I wanted to print out my own receipts, because the idea of being able to print things out at home, no matter how mundane what you're printing is, seemed really neat to me at the time. This was, of course, a couple of years before most homes had even just dot-matrix printers. (Though my father would eventually get this remote terminal device that didn't have a monitor, just a printer, so he could play electonic Dungeons & Dragons on some sort of primitive internal computer network at Bell.)

Strangely, I also remember playing with a old-fashioned style Fisher-Price toy cash register (the one with the big red, yellow, and blue plastic "coins"), but that must have been either at kindergarten or at one of my friends' houses.

None of the other presents in the shot seem to have been for me. I'm pretty sure the tricycle was for my then two-year old sister. I don't know who got the shape-sorting thing. And the still-wrapped trapezoidal toy that is almost certainly a Fisher-Price activity centre thingamabob (you know, one of those things with a different item on each side?).

I'm not sure what that big red thing next to me was. Did my parents do the "Santa's sack" thing that year, because it certainly was never a regular thing at our house for "Santa" to leave his "bag" there. (We got presents, but the big ones were just put under the tree and my parents never claimed that those ones were from Santa Claus, just the small ones we got in our stockings.)


¹ Not that Blogger displays them at 300 dpi, as it shrinks them down to a maximum size of 1024 pixels a side. But, if, for whatever reason, you wish to see the pictures at 300 dpi, I've started a "The Ghost of a Christmas Long Past" album in my Fotopic.net gallery.

posted by Steve Brandon @ 11:34 PM