I found some of the old Sears and Penney's catalogs online. http://www.wishbookweb.com/ And around Christmastime, I sent a bunch of pages to my parents. I had just about everything there was from those catalogs. I remember a great hot wheels Christmas, where I got everything I must've asked for, and some other stuff I did not remember even seeing in the catalog. My dad (wait. santa) had set everything up, too. So it was all set up under the tree and ready to run. Plastic orange is a great all-over-under-the-tree color.
I remember Christmas's pretty well. They were a big deal to me. I have a dad who liked (and still likes) toys, so there was no weird gap there. He seemed to have fun, too. And, because of that, they bought me some cool stuff.
Looking through the catalogs made me recall a small gap that I was aware of as a kid, and I wondered if anyone else remembers this. There were toys that were yours, that you remembered getting, right? A great Christmas (or birthday or some other holiday) and you can remember getting it. It's yours.
But then, there's some other stuff that I remember, that I do not where it came from. I think, as a kid, this was something I was fairly interested in. There were cars and racetracks and stuff that I liked but did not recall receiving.
And, whether it was given to me by my parents, or if it came as a hand-me-down from neighbors, or my sister or something, the point was, that it came to me before I could remember getting it. And, I remember being aware as a kid, that there was this whole section of my earlier life that I could not remember clearly. A blurry, dark area of my seven year old brain, already damaged. It bothered me. It seemed so shameful.
They would explain to me that I was just a baby, and that nobody remembers when they were a baby. But, I did not buy it.
I still don't.
