"A picture is worth..."

I know, according to the the calendar it's still too early for holiday reveries (although by "Wal Mart time" we should be several weeks into it by now) but I was recently transported back in time several decades by the Ghost of Christmas Past when I scanned some old photos for my mother in the hopes of digitally preserving the shots and making copies for relatives.  I've also taken the liberty of uploading them to my Flickr account and they're viewable here.

The photos were from Christmas of 1967, as noted in the margin of the prints.  I was still a few months away from my 8th birthday and the scenes brought back a lot of memories for me, some that I had carried with me all this time and others that had been set aside until now.  I recall having a lot of toys to play with when I was a kid.  Our family was never "well off" by anyone's standards but we kids wanted for very little, especially at Christmas.  As many of the toys I've owned that I could remember, there are probably just as many if not more that I've forgotten about, much like an aging Jackie Paper leaving his friend Puff back in Honah Lee.

The toy in the foreground of this picture left me puzzled because I couldn't for the life of me remember owning it or even asking Santa for it.  Curious, I turned to the Web and in very short order I learned that the "4 Way Sub Gun" was part of the merchandise cranked out in the '60s that was licensed by the TV show "Voyage To the Bottom Of the Sea."  I was never a real follower of the series at the time, I only had a passing familiarity with it but my mother being aware of my love for all things sci-fi no doubt had bought it to add to the rest of my holiday toy haul anyway.  Searching a little further, I learned that the toy is now a very pricey collector's item!

Even though the toy most likely wasn't on my wish list I'm sure I had lots of fun with it before it inevitably broke or pieces of it got lost.  If only I had kept every toy I ever received unopened and tucked away in a vault filled with pure nitrogen somewhere I'd be a millionaire many times over by now.  All of the various comics and games, Batmania paraphernalia, Major Matt Mason bendable figures with every battery-powered gizmo and play-set they could be sold separately from combined would be more than enough to send every one of my grand-kids (present and hoped-for) to Harvard and still have plenty of change left over.

But even if I'd known that at the time, I probably would have still chosen the path I took which was to actually play with my toys.  I wasn't rewarded monetarily for all of the hours I spent wrapping my imagination around all of the gifts I enjoyed unwrapping.  Instead, I've been blessed with a childhood full of mostly-happy memories and an imagination that has carried me into adulthood and far beyond.  Those collectors who stash toys away in specualtion of earning a big price tag for them on eBay might get a fat bank account for their efforts.  But my guess is that their cash-rich lives are that much more fun-poor for their efforts.