Pod Insights Pop Culture Happy Hour Best Christmas Gift I Ever Received About this episode What's the best Christmas gift you ever received? You probably didn't have to think about it; you knew it in your bones. Today, in this encore episode, we're talking about the actual, tangible gift you found waiting for you under the tree and still think about it from time to time.
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1:31 Speaker 02 What's the best Christmas gift you've ever received? Was it the laughter of your children, the love of a good friend, a smile on your partner's face, maybe a dusting of snow glittering in the Christmas Eve moonlight? Yeah, well, we're not talking about any of that nonsense.
1:45 Linda Holmes? We're talking actual tangible Christmas gifts here. Specifically, that one gift you found waiting for you under the tree and still think about from time to time. I'm Linda Holmes.
1:55 Speaker 02 And I'm Glen Weldon. And on this encore episode of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour, we're talking about the best Christmas gifts we've ever received.
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3:22 Speaker 02 Joining us today is our fellow co-host, Stephen Thompson. Hey, pal. Hello, Glenn. Hey there. And also here is Andrew Limbong. He is the host of NPR's Book of the Day podcast and a reporter for the Culture Desk. Welcome back, Andrew. Yo, yo, yo. Hey, what's up? Hey. A mercifully brief intro here because this subject needs no explanation, no explanatory comma. I say, best Christmas gift you ever received, and you probably didn't have to think about it. You knew it in your bones. Most people do. Lynda, did you kick us off?
3:50 Linda Holmes? Yeah, I did know immediately. When I was probably, I'm gonna say I was about 12 or 13, I received a small Casio keyboard, Casio electronic keyboard from my parents.
4:04 Speaker 02 I got one of those, too.
4:05 Linda Holmes? Which was a gift I really, really wanted. And based on my very inadequate research, it probably at the time cost about $100, which is like $300 now. That was a very expensive present for me. That's probably one of the most expensive presents I ever got as a kid. And I really wanted it. And I had taken a couple of years of piano, so I was like moderately competent with like, you know, picking out tunes and stuff like that.
4:31 Stephen Thompson? But were you able to set those piano performances to rumba?
4:34 Linda Holmes? Well, rumba, tango, waltz, soft rock.
4:40 Speaker 02 Soft rock.
4:41 Linda Holmes? And in fact, this is when I learned what a begin is because begin was one of the rhythms. And what I love about this gift, looking back, is that this was a time when I think DIY creativity really kind of took root in me because, you know, now, of course, anybody can do this. Any kid can do this. There are apps that can do this. They can make all kinds of sound effects and voice effects and, you know, you can create a song in about 20 seconds. But at the time, this was really, really cool to me. And I kind of stayed that person. Like, I was realizing I still like, I still do crafts. I still like to make like mugs and T-shirts and stuff like that. I am that person. At the time of the 2020 election, I made myself a shirt that said, I never wanted to know this
5:24 Linda Holmes? much about the Michigan Board of State canvassers. And I still like stuff like that. And so I feel like my parents were most willing to splurge because it was a creative thing. And I think they recognized that as something that I really cared about. And music is something that I really cared about. And the other great thing is my mother was always one of these moms who like, she doesn't want you to know as soon as you see the package that you got, the thing you've been asking for for like, you know, all year. So she wrapped the AC adapter and that was what was under the tree.
5:57 Stephen Thompson? We will talk about the importance of obscuring the best gift of all time.
6:02 Speaker 05 Yeah. So where was it hidden? Was it in like a closet or something?
6:04 Linda Holmes? Yeah, she had it, I think, in their bedroom closet. And so once I opened the AC adapter, I was like, what is this?
6:10 Speaker 02 And you didn't snoop? You were not a snooper?
6:12 Linda Holmes? No, I would never.
6:14 Speaker 02 Oh, man.
6:15 Linda Holmes? Kidding me? I would never.
6:16 Stephen Thompson? The devil you say. Heaven forfend.
6:19 Speaker 02 I was a super snooper. Had everything ruined for me. Me too. You know, Lynda, it's interesting to me that you draw the line between getting that Casio keyboard and crafts and DIY and not becoming a DJ, for example. Like, it's not. It's, that's the through line for you. Why do you think that is?
6:35 Stephen Thompson? You could have been the next Skrillex.
6:38 Linda Holmes? Because I think that's how I processed it, right? Like, my feeling was this was a way to make stuff. This was a way to make up stuff. And I was already, like, I already wrote stories and I already did that kind of thing. I certainly did not have it in mind that I was going to be a DJ. I did have it in mind that I might, like, study music. I liked music. I liked singing. I liked, you know, chorus and stuff like that. But I think it was, it mostly had to do with, like, I want to make up stuff, you know?
7:05 Stephen Thompson? I remember when I got my keyboard, and Lynda, you and I are a similar age, and I remember getting a keyboard and thinking, will I be the next Harold Faltermeyer? Will I be the next Paul Hardcastle? You know, there were, there were a few hit songs that were like a guy at a keyboard going da, da, da, da, da.
7:24 Linda Holmes? It was early synthesizer times, you know, like, in terms of popular music. I mean, I think I probably imagined myself, like, impressing people by, by playing music, which of course was never going to happen. It was like, you know, the episode of Friends where Ross talks about his sound and then he plays this, his little synthesizer?
7:41 Stephen Thompson? Yes.
7:42 Linda Holmes? It was, it was probably, you know, I envisioned, much as Ross did, greatness through my music, but that never came to be.
7:49 Speaker 02 Uh, but greatness came in other ways.
7:51 Linda Holmes? Oh, jeez, I hope so.
7:52 Speaker 02 Thank you very much, Linda Holmes. Andrew, how about you, man?
7:55 Speaker 05 Um, all right. So my family, we're very aggressively Christian in that Christmas was about, like, going to church. I was just thinking, the midnight mass, go to church, and then get up and go to church on Christmas morning is a brutal turnaround time.
8:08 Stephen Thompson? Double dip.
8:09 Speaker 05 Yeah. And so I never got any, like, big-ticket items for Christmas. I think one time my parents gave me some pens. You know, I got some socks when you, it was that kind of thing.
8:18 Stephen Thompson? Pens, socks, and prayer.
8:19 Speaker 02 And the Lord.
8:20 Speaker 05 Yeah, yep, that's the, that's the truth.
8:22 Linda Holmes? The Christmas every kid dreams about.
8:25 Speaker 05 Welcome to Lutheranism, everybody. Join, come on in, you know? But my, we had a family friend who was a little older or a lot older. It's hard how memory works, but I was with her at the mall at Sam Goody, the music store. Oh, yeah. And I think she was just like taking care of like me, right? Some kid and was like, oh, what do you, what do you want for Christmas? Da, da, da. And so because my parents weren't around, I asked her to get me Enema of the State by Blink 182. And that ended up being what I know this is painfully on brand for me. It kind of is. I, I look at my life, the expanse of the Andrew Limbong experience. And it is one of those formative bits of culture that like, I don't know.
9:07 Speaker 05 I think, I think we've got a clip of just like the first couple of seconds of the album. This is off of Dump Weed.
9:15 Speaker 05 This is just like hitting those like needles in my brain. Shorts punk. And then like Travis comes in right here with these like steel ska drums, you know? And
9:29 Speaker 05 Parvita, we don't have to like repeat like the chorus of the song because it isn't particularly aged well. But there's a lot of firsts this album has for me. It's not my favorite Blink record. It's not, I think their best one either, but I think it's the first like CD I got where the songs on the album were better than the ones that were on the radio. Oh, sure. That's important. You know, it was one of those like, oh, there's like other stuff here. You know, like I said, it was very transgressive. So it was the first CD I ever had to hide from my parents. I was gonna ask. That's the thing. You know, it's my first memory of deciding to be a type of guy. Oh, sure. You go through like different like types of guys and I was like, I think I'm like a, this kind of guy now. And you were.
10:12 Speaker 05 And I was, and well, kind of, I was also very a Goody Two Shoes, you know? Sort of floating between the two. Me too. That's why I didn't snoop. And, and, and I don't know. I think I can pretty much draw a pretty clear line from like liking Blink 182 to liking Fugazi, to getting into like nonprofit journalism, you know? They're a gateway band. It does make sense. Yeah, it was. And it was, and I'm, I'm reading a AV Club review here written by a Stephen Thompson. Oh, my gosh. And it says, quote, "Despite the moronic title, Blink 182's well-publicized love of scatological stupidity generally takes a backseat to self-aware tales of doomed relationships." I think that was pretty much me from like 10 to.
10:54 Speaker 05 To thirty four, you know, that's, that's a good, that's a good description.
10:58 Speaker 02 Scatological stupidity, you mean?
10:59 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, I'd make a fair amount of pee pee poo poo jokes, I think.
11:04 Stephen Thompson? One thing that Blink one eighty two always did really well is they understood that there's a part of adolescence that never entirely leaves us. I mean, it's called enema of the state.
11:15 Speaker 02 Yes, it is.
11:16 Speaker 05 Yeah.
11:16 Speaker 02 All right. Thank you very much, Andrew. Stephen Thompson, your turn.
11:19 Stephen Thompson? All right. The year was nineteen eighty three, which I think, you know, age eleven is a really nice year to get your best Christmas present. My parents went all in on the concept of not only the buildup to the big present, but they actually created ritual around it. We did a treasure hunt for our big present. I was a snooper, so sometimes I knew what my big present was. Sometimes you could kind of surmise what your big present was based on a combination of factors, such as how fervently you asked for it and how little it might have cost. So in nineteen eighty three, I get to a big package and it is a bound volume of Uncle Scrooge comics. And I love Uncle Scrooge comics.
12:03 Stephen Thompson? I still have my collection of all those Gladstone bound volumes of Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck comics. And it was like, and it was the latest volume. And I was like, oh, you know, that's, that's a perfectly fine gift. You know, I like these comics. I'll, I'll look forward to digging into this. Rip it open like, and kind of feign super excitement. And there's another little card tucked in between the books. And that card said, this is not your final present. And it was another clue. It was a clue that was pretty much the direct location of my actual present, which was a ColecoVision.
12:41 Stephen Thompson? Now, the ColecoVision was basically the gateway technology between the Atari twenty six hundred and the Nintendo. You could also say Sega Genesis, something like that.
12:53 Linda Holmes? Well, and there was also Intellivision in there for a while.
12:56 Stephen Thompson? And television was kind of at the same time as Atari.
12:58 Linda Holmes? Yeah.
12:59 Stephen Thompson? Along with Odyssey. And if you, anyway, I could, believe me, I could talk about this for a very long time. But the ColecoVision was a really clear. Obvious step up from the Atari 2600. The gameplay was so much more sophisticated. The music was more sophisticated. The games were a little more complicated, but not as complicated as they are now, where I feel like I would have to learn a new language to play them. I had a friend with a ColecoVision and I coveted it so, so desperately. But like, that was what like wealthy dowagers bought.
13:33 Stephen Thompson? Nobody, who buys a ColecoVision in this economy, in the economy of the early eighties? But my parents, bless them, bought me a ColecoVision and then were subjected to hours upon hours upon hours upon hours of the music, the endlessly looping music from the video game, The Smurfs. Oh my god. And as we wandered around as that little Smurf.
14:02 Speaker 02 Oh boy.
14:03 Stephen Thompson? It was about, about a 15 second loop. My parents, I'm sure, regretted that gift greatly. But when we talked about this topic, it took me 0.1 seconds to know that the best gift I received as a child was my ColecoVision. In part because like Linda's parents, they got crafty about it. They steeled me for disappointment and then went in there, "Zah, you got what you wanted."
14:29 Speaker 02 David, do questions for you. How many ColecoVision controllers did you burn through? Because those things famously flimsy.
14:36 Stephen Thompson? I am glad you brought this up. The worst thing about the, the ColecoVision came out around the same time as the Atari 5200. And what they had in common was the controllers were made of garbage. So a lot of ColecoVision play today is done on emulators. But I still love mine, still have mine. The controllers still kind of work.
14:57 Speaker 02 Okay, follow up. Have you passed on the tradition of doing the treasure hunt to your kids? And if so, are they, did they handle it with cheer and holiday joy? Or were they surly and like said it was lame?
15:09 Stephen Thompson? So I am a lazy, lazy monster. And I did not, I did not continue it. That was one tradition I had meant to pass on to my kids. The other that I, that I recommend, even though I haven't done it with my kids, we had a bed present. You would go to bed and you would wake up and there'd be a, my parents would have sneaked in like the tooth fairy and deposited a gift at the foot of our beds.
15:31 Linda Holmes? We did that with stockings. Our parents would put our stockings in our room. How many gifts are you guys getting? I don't understand this culture.
15:40 Speaker 02 I was gonna say, cut to Andrew like, I got a pen.
15:43 Stephen Thompson? We were a largely secular family, Andrew.
15:45 Linda Holmes? What are you, what's going on? It's like multiple kids.
15:49 Speaker 02 I got a steak.
15:50 Linda Holmes? We didn't get a ton of things. Like, I suspect the year I got the keyboard, I didn't get much else from my parents would be my guess.
15:56 Speaker 02 That's the way that works.
15:56 Stephen Thompson? My parents' entire personalities were kind of built around obsession with pop culture you love. I was raised by a family that made me very well suited for this job. My parents were comic book obsessives and they were professional comic book fans. And so if I expressed an interest in something, in collecting something, in trading something with my friends, in reading something, or watching something, or playing something, my parents at least really wanted to indulge that gift. That's the language my parents speak is obsession.
16:28 Linda Holmes? Yeah, and, and I think one of my mom's love languages is gifts, you know? So I think that was one of the reasons with me is my mom just loved shopping for presents. And I remember one year, she was a teacher, and one year her class did one of those adopt a family things where you get a list of things that a family needs. And the idea is that like each kid brings in one or two things on the list, whatever. And for whatever combination of reasons, her class like didn't really do the assignment. And so there were a bunch of things left on the list. And right before Christmas, my mom like went out and bought everything on the list so that the family would get everything that was on the list. Like, some people just really like buying and giving presents. And I think, I think that's the other reason why I usually got several Christmas presents from my parents.
17:10 Speaker 02 I think we've seen a through line here of all of these favorite gifts ever. Kind of are on brand, as Andrew pointed out. I'm going to continue that tradition.
17:20 Speaker 06 The Joker, holy cow. It's Batman, sold separately, and the Wayne Foundation, a crime fighting lab. Assembly required. The top floor is Batman's penthouse. Bring it down. The elevator takes Batman past the computer station, down to the communication center. There's a Batman trophy room, working elevator, and a bookcase with secret hiding compartment.
17:40 Speaker 02 Working elevator, wow. Did you pick up, Andrew, that they mentioned the elevator twice? That the elevator takes me down? And then there's also an elevator. Very excited about the elevator. All right, so in the 70s, Mego was this company that made 8-inch action figures of your favorite superheroes. I collected these action figures. I played with them. I undressed them. I made them kiss the way all red-blooded American boys would do. So, um, the Batcopter, I had it. The Batcycle, I had it. The Batmobile, do you even have to ask? The Mobile Bat Lab, which was basically a VW van, it's best not to think about that too hard. I had it. Uh, the Bat Cave Playset with working Bat Signal and Batpole and the secret entrance, just like in the TV show, didn't have that. My friend David had that.
18:25 Speaker 02 Wouldn't let me forget that he had that. That was the year, famously, just before Christmas, when my mother read me a letter from Santa himself, saying, very briefly, because he was a busy man, "Dear Glenn, we are out of Bat Caves." Which kinda threw my little 7-year-old self into a loop, because, I mean, can't you just make the elves work harder, right? Can't you just take away their lunch breaks? Get it together. Can't you dock their pay? You've got quotas to meet. If this is a supply chain issue, I get it, but can't you just, like, shift some of that extruded plastic from one project to another? If it means I get my Bat Cave, maybe there's a few less Snoopy snow cone machines in the world. But, um, and also, there was the fact that she had a letter from Santa,
19:09 Speaker 02 you know, physical proof that was a close encounter of at least the second kind, and I thought, I'd like, I gotta frame that. You gotta frame that. So, cut to 2 years later, 1977. I was 9. I was still, you know, roiling over the, of the Bat Cave fiasco. Came down the stairs on Christmas morning, and there it was. 4 stories of pure...
19:29 Speaker 02 Bat goodness, and I urge you all to Google this playset. It was and remains a thing of beauty. This thing was nearly three and a half feet tall. I was what, four feet tall? So like, and it was, you know, there was some very similar to it because it was based on the skyscraper that Batman was actually working out of in the comics, uh, because he had abandoned the Batcave at the start of the seventies. Long story. Physical accessories. Sure. It had the trophy case. It had the computer monitor. It had chairs, which I could never get anybody to sit in. But the exciting thing for me was that on each floor had a back wall that was illustrated to make it look like it went back or like that had depth. And that was illustrated by Neil Adams, who was the artist behind the revamp of Batman at the time. And it was filled with references to the TV show and the comics. And I could get lost in that for days.
20:11 Linda Holmes? Oh, I remember. I, I think for some reason I've looked at pictures of this before because it's just the Barbie dream house.
20:17 Speaker 02 Yep. Now, did I realize to your point, Linda, that this thing was basically a reskinned Malibu Barbie dream house? I very much did. Because I could not, because my dad had spent the years up to me receiving it, making it very clear to me that he was not nuts about my action figure collection. You know, it was one thing having an indoor kid. I think he had reconciled himself to that. But this whole action figure thing was a little close to the line for him, which is why he always called them my little dollies. That was probably why I never had the guts to get a Batgirl or a Wonder Woman, though I wanted them so bad because I would see them in the store and their packaging and they had this terrible frizzy hair. And I'd be like, girl, we could flat iron that mess, you know? I mean, I can,
21:01 Speaker 02 I knew, I knew that would not fly. And yet, and yet, and yet I come down. And here it is. It's nothing but a giant dollhouse for my little dollies, taking up this huge chunk of real estate in the den. I was thinking about this, this morning. I don't remember him making fun of me about my action figures after that. So looking back now, it is this towering, like, I mean, three and a half feet, but towering. Testament to my father's ability to get over his damn self and give his kid the thing that he knew would make him happy. So here is a through line I'm picking up on throughout all of these selections we've made. There's the thing itself, which is great, but there's what it represented, right? There's, there's like how it figures, how it kind of,
21:46 Speaker 02 it steers your destiny in some way. So, and also, by the way, the thing it represents, I looked on eBay this morning, uh, two to four thousand bucks nowadays.
21:54 Linda Holmes? Geez.
21:54 Stephen Thompson? Oh, dear.
21:56 Linda Holmes? I look at this picture, Glenn, and I did find a picture of it. And I can completely understand how this would be an extraordinarily exciting gift for any kid, but especially you.
22:07 Stephen Thompson? Glenn, buddy, I know you love your, your parents very, very much.
22:10 Speaker 02 Yes, I do.
22:10 Stephen Thompson? I do look at this and I think, buddy, I, I wish for you, for you to just have experienced an alternate timeline in which you and I got to be brothers and my parents got the son they never had. Because I had the parents who were foisting comic books on them.
22:28 Speaker 02 Yep.
22:28 Stephen Thompson? Wow, the art in this is incredible. I'm just looking at the. Yeah, it's beautiful.
22:32 Speaker 02 Isn't it right? And it's got references to, to the atomic thing in the old Batman television show. It's got references to all these other characters. There's gold from the metal man, a picture of him for absolutely no reason, who never crossed over with Batman so much.
22:44 Linda Holmes? It's very intricate.
22:46 Speaker 02 It is.
22:47 Stephen Thompson? Yeah, it's very of its time.
22:49 Speaker 02 It very much is. Well, we want to know, what was the best Christmas gift you ever received? And why was it less good than the Queen Foundation place? Find us at facebook.com/PCHH. That brings us to the end of our show. Andrew Limbong, Linda Holmes, Stephen Thompson. Thanks, pals. This was fun.
23:05 Stephen Thompson? Yeah, thank you.
23:06 Speaker 02 Thank you.
23:07 Linda Holmes? Thanks, Glenn. This was really fun.
23:08 Speaker 02 This episode was produced by Liz Metzger and edited by Jessica Riddy. And Hello, Come In provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Glen Weldon, and we'll see you all tomorrow.
23:22 Speaker 00 Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.
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