My daughter and Grandkids got me a big bundle of vintage toy parts for Christmas., "cos they know I just love to rummage and ID stuff.
I've started to identify a few.
Father Christmas's sack was full again this year.
Santa, my family and friends pulled out all the festive stops and treated me handsomely on my birthday and Christmas.
Tons of ace books; Vipco VHS, a pulp horror digest and three tomes missing from my 1970's martial arts collection ( thanks Bill!)
What did you get for Christmas readers?
Well this is Boxing Day and what are you doing?
Always an odd one, like Sunday after a Saturday and despite the ecclesiastical Yuletide season lasting until Candlemass, for many now Christmas is over by Boxing Day.
It's still festive but true Christmas has been and gone I feel.
This year, for the Missus and me, Boxing Day is a day of rest after a particularly jolly family Christmas Eve and Day at our daughter's house in Thackley, eating, singing, opening prezzies and playing games.
It wasn't always a day of rest though.
As a kid in the Sixties, Boxing Day was a much bigger family affair than Christmas itself, as all the various branches of the clan, the five families, descended on my parents' house in Preston to eat, play, dance, talk and grown-up drink. Lots of drink!
Looking back I don't know how my Mum pulled it off. She must have been knackered already after getting everything ready for 5 children on Christmas Eve, cooking for 10 on Christmas Day and knocking up a buffet for 30+ on Boxing Day. I'd like to think my Dad helped her. He will have certainly sorted out all the booze at least. I bet Mum couldn't wait for the 27th, when she could put her feet up and watch the Onedin Line again like normal for a few days, before further graft to make New Year happen! That too required further food and drink for neighbours this time, the war generation at last at ease, dancing to Frank Sinatra in the lounge and kissing each other's husbands and wives at midnight, sometimes rather too much as in my Dad's case!
For me the end of the Christmas Season was the mournful sounding of the ships' horns on Preston Docks as the clock struck twelve on News Years Eve, a sound from the past recorded clearly in my child's mind.
My two older brothers and one older Sister still living in Lancashire do still convene at her house on Boxing Day and probably have continuously since our parents died decades ago, a truly valiant effort to keep the spirit of our Sixties home alive.
Having moved away young and living abroad, then ultimately settling in Yorkshire a good few hours drive away from Lancashire's coast, I haven't been able to keep up really.
Seeing my siblings throughout the year anyway, nowadays I focus on enjoying the season with my wife and our own family here, which in itself requires quite a bit of travel to Shipley or the Dales.
This year, as we are at home slowly getting ready for friends staying for a week as of tomorrow, to celebrate Boxing Day 2025 and the spirit of what it once was for me, I shall be watching Carry on Screaming on the telly soon, it's crazy monster antics so reminding me of my happy monster-filled childhood in the 1960's and early 70's.
We'll be frying tonight!
What are you doing today readers? Was Boxing Day a big day as a kid for you?
The good news is .... My mate Mark has saved Christmas!
The darn plumbers never showed to fix their mistakes but Mark grabbed his tool bag ( and his young son!) and came to the rescue!
A couple of hours later, both leaks fixed!
Yay!
💦💦
With the house warm and dry again I've been relaxing with my new NASA 2001 Space Glider, the unusual blue one. It's a real Austrian beauty!
Late last night I caught A Christmas Carol, the 1951 black and white version starring Alistair Sim as Scrooge.
For me personally, this is the best film version of the Dickens tale and one which starts Christmas proper.
The film somehow seems to capture the London fog, the poverty, the wealth and the downright eeriness of the mid- 1800's, not bad going in 1951. It feels like a genuinely scary ghost story, say, in the same creepy way MR James' tales were televised. It's British Gothic at its best.
The appearance of Mervyn Johns as Bob Cratchett, a man running out of time for his son, harks back to his role in the equally fabulous and unsettling Dead of Night from 1945, amazingly after a WWII UK ban on horror being made, where he plays an architect lost in a recurring and very very disquieting dream. The finale with the dummy is simply stunning!
Both these black and white movies are just great and would go well as a double-bill.
What do you think readers?
Above - Spacex II Booster Rocket backing card rear
Above - Spacex II MOLAB backing card rear
Above - Spacex II Lunar Orbitor backing card rear
Above - Spacex II Lunar Orbitor and Apollo Tracker backing card rears and Boxed Moon Base Set ( foldable plastic lunar plan not shown)
Above - Spacex II MOLAB backing card front and Lunar Orbiter front (with toy, astronaut and badge)
Above - top left: Elf Toys Tracy Island Prototype with Dinky die- casts: Top right - Elf Toys Tracy Island actual toy with JR21 vehicles
Above - top left: MARX Lunar Exploration boxed sets: Top right - 2001 NASA remote- control GliderWas it Christmas when you got your new toys as a kid?
It was for me.
OK, there was a slow drip of gifts and impulse buys throughout the year, maybe a surprise at Easter and certainly pick-me-ups when I was ill and off school (yay!).
But it was Christmas Day when my shelves were re-stocked properly, the new must-haves like Haunted House and the Johnny Seven One Man Army appearing under the tree (just how did Father Christmas get that down the chimney?).
My Christmas-located birthday just added to the festive bonanza and basically the two big days brought me up to date in the world of toydom and annuals, not to mention clothes and selection boxes! (They were the best!)
What was it like for you readers?
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