Seeing as how Christmas is rapidly approaching, I thought this might be an interesting topic. What was your favorite Christmas present, or toy? Or, what was your favorite holiday memory?
For me, it's hard to narrow down, but here's one of the ones that ranks pretty high.
It was some point after midnight on Christmas Eve. I was sleeping, my parents woke me up, and asked me to come downstairs. My mother and my grandfather went out to the car and carried in a full-sized color television. At the time, I had a small black & white television in my room, so I was thinking 'oh cool, I've got a color TV now.' But, after they set up the TV in the corner of the room, my mom went back out to the car, and she returned with an Atari 2600 game console. It was brand new and still in the box.
Here's the funny part and it's something that I've never forgotten. On the front of the box, in very large print, it read 'Complimentary Only, Not for Retail Sale.' I never asked why it said that, but over the years, I think I've figured the whole thing out.
At the time, my mother worked for the newspaper, she delivered papers, and sold subscriptions. The paper used to run contests, if you sold x number of subscriptions, you could win various prizes. I'm now relatively certain that she must have sold a bunch of subscriptions to get the video game console for me. The TV was obviously second-hand and she'd probably bought it at the Goodwill, or someplace like that.
As you might guess, considering what she was doing for a living, we weren't exactly well-off at the time, and that contest was probably the only way that I could have received such a present.
Trust me, over the next few years, that Atari saw plenty of use.
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Topic: Best Christmas Present (or Toy Oriented) Memories... (Read 3547 times)
