Rick McNeal reflects on his painful Christmases growing up as a child in Menasha.
SEASON’S BEATINGS
I was a childhood victim of ritual abuse.
Year after year, my parents required me to participate in a custom rife with religious overtones that usually left me both physically and emotionally scarred. As sick as it sounds, I even grew to look forward to partaking in this annual rite. I guess I was afflicted with a type of hysterical amnesia that would block out the pain and suffering inflicted on me the previous year while allowing me to remember only good parts of this barbaric annual practice. Naturally, I’m talking about Christmas.
December 25th would always begin promisingly with my family gifting me with some knock off version of toys from my Christmas wish list. Yet, it always seemed to end the same way as well, with the invocation of our family’s sacred mantra…. “JUST PUT SOME ICE ON IT UNTIL THE SWELLING GOES DOWN”.
I doubt it was my family’s intent to maim me every Christmas, but in the years before watchdog groups began issuing annual Most Dangerous Toy lists; yuletide injuries were as common as shop teachers named “Stubby”. I suffered numerous cuts, scrapes, bumps and bruises from my Christmas gifts. By my own count, at least six of my childhood Christmas’ were marred by me burning myself. While the scent of cinnamon or pine needles remind some of the holiday season, for me, it’s the smell of my own searing flesh that awakens those nostalgic memories.
One of my favorite childhood toys was the Creepy Crawlers Thingmaker that I received for Christmas when I was seven years old. For those unfamiliar with the original Thingmaker, it was a small metal box that when plugged into an electrical outlet would warm to a temperature about four degrees hotter than the surface of the sun. They might as well just named this device Junior’s Li’l Third Degree Burn Maker. Is it any wonder that the following year my Christmas list was topped by The Mattel Kiddy Skin Grafters’ Kit? Unfortunately, the next year I was to receive a wood burning set and a completely new assortment of lesions.
While it would have made sense to include with each Thingmaker a role of gauze bandages and a tube of hydrocortisone cream, it sadly came only with several metal molds and squeeze bottles of Plastigoop. The Plastigoop was brightly colored viscous goo which when heated in the molds made a variety of toy bugs and rodents. From what I remember about the texture, smell and taste of the Plastigoop, I believe that it would, years later, be marketed under the name Heinz EZ Squirt Colored Ketchup.
While the Thingmaker resulted in me getting burned more often than a Chicago Bears’ safety, danger-wise, it paled in comparison to the electric train set I had received just a year before.
Maybe it was just the nature of the off-brand train-set my parents had purchased or maybe it had something to do with dad having a little too much Christmas cheer before helping me assemble it, but I have only two memories of my train set. 1) The unforgettable smell of melting plastic that emanated from the transformer when left on for more than 18 seconds and 2) the shock that knocked me flat on my pre-adolescent ass. I had imagined that having a toy train would make me an engineer but instead, it made me a conductor…. of about 120 volts. After years of my mother telling me that if I didn’t behave I’d be grounded, I finally found myself wishing that I were.
Ron Kroetz / CC
After the big shock, my mother put the train set away “until your father can make sure it’s safe”. I never saw it again. Rumor has it that mom sold it to the state of Texas where they have been using it to execute inmates since 1967.
Of course, it wasn’t just the electric toys that were dangerous when I was a kid. I fondly remember a game from Parker Brothers called “Booby Trap”. I don’t recall how old I was when I received “Booby Trap” but I was still young enough that I didn’t yet giggle every time it was mentioned by name. The game board was “spring loaded” and came with about 60 wooden playing pieces, each small enough to create such a choking hazard they should have been embossed with the logo of the Minnesota Vikings. The object of “Booby Trap” was to remove the games pieces without tripping the spring bar and having it snap down on your fingers.
While I enjoyed playing “Booby Trap”, I dreaded dealing with mom after she would receive a call from my school. “Your teacher says your penmanship seems to have gotten worse since Christmas break. Explain yourself!” I had neither the courage nor the verbal dexterity to tell mom that it was difficult to write properly when I had not had any sensation in my fingertips since New Year’s Day. By the time I returned to school, my fingers had taken more hits than Willie Nelson’s bong. If my fingers were any more bruised and battered, Bobby Brown would have proposed to them!
As much as my many minor boo-boos cast a pall over my early holidays, they at least prepared me for dealing with Christmas as an adult. Getting burned is nothing compared to the pain of tussling with fellow shoppers in a crowded mall or department store on a holiday weekend. Being bruised doesn’t even begin to measure up to the indignity of begging a store clerk to see what they can do to find just one more of what ever sold-out-everywhere, must-have-toy a child on your list simply cannot live without. And shock? Well, just wait until January. You’ll get a big enough shock to light up the eastern seaboard when your December credit card bills arrive! -Rick McNeal-
