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Hi, Linda Holmes here.
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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.
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Specifically that one gift you found waiting for you under the tree and still think about from time to time.
I'm Linda Holmes.
And I'm Glenn 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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Joining us today is our fellow co-host Stephen Thompson.
Hey, pal.
Hello, Glenn.
Hey, there.
And also here is Andrew Limbaugh.
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.
Linda, did you kick us off?
Yeah, I did know immediately when I was probably, I'm going to say I was about 12 or 13.
I received a small Casio keyboard, Casio electronic keyboard from my parents.
I got one of those too.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
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.
But were you able to set those piano performances to rumba?
Well, rumba, tango, waltz, soft rock.
Soft rock.
And in fact, this is when I learned what a beguine is because beguine 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 everything.
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 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.
We will talk about the importance of obscuring the best gift of all time.
Yeah, so where was it hidden?
Was it in like a closet or something?
Yeah, she had it, I think, in their bedroom closet.
And so once I opened the AC adapter, I was like, what is this?
And you didn't snoop?
You were not a snooper?
No, I would never.
Oh, man.
Are you kidding me?
I would never.
That devil you say.
Heaven forfend.
I was a super snooper.
I had everything ruined for me.
Me too.
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.
That's the through line for you.
Why do you think that is?
You could have been the next Skrillex.
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.
I remember when I got my keyboard and Linda, 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 a few hit songs that were like a guy at a keyboard going.
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 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 little synthesizer.
It was probably you know.
I envisioned much as Ross did greatness through my music, but that never came to me.
But greatness came in other ways.
Oh, jeez.
I hope so.
Thank you very much, Linda Holmes.
Andrew, how about you, man?
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.
Double tips.
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're that kind of thing.
Pens, socks, and prayer.
And the Lord.
Yeah.
Christmas every kid dreams about.
Welcome to Lutheranism, everybody.
Come on in, you know.
But 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, what do you want for Christmas?
And so because my parents weren't around, I asked her to get me Enema of the State by Blink-182.
And it is the, I know this is painfully on brand for me.
It kind of is.
I look at my life, the expanse of the Andrew Limbaugh experience.
And it is one of those formative bits of culture that, like I don't know, I think we've got a clip of just like the first couple seconds of the album.
This is off of Dumpweed.
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 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 CD I got where the songs on the album were better than the ones that were on the radio.
Oh, sure.
That's important.
It was one of those like, oh, there's other stuff here.
Like I said, it was very transgressive.
So it was the first CD I ever had to hide from my parents.
I was going to ask.
That's the thing.
It's my first memory of deciding to be a type of guy oh sure, you know 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 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 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 non-profit journalism.
You know They're a gateway band.
It does make sense.
Yeah, it was.
And 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...
To 34?
You know, that's a good description.
Scatological stupidity, you mean?
Yeah, yeah.
I'd make a fair amount of pee-pee-poo-poo jokes, I think.
One thing that Blink-182 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.
Yes, it is.
Yeah.
All right.
Thank you very much, Andrew.
Stephen Thompson, your turn.
All right.
The year was 1983, which I think you know.
Age 11 is a really nice year to get your best Christmas present.
My parents went all in on 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 1983, I get to a big package and it is a bound volume of Uncle Scrooge comics.
And I love Uncle Scrooge comics.
I still have my collection of all those Gladstone bound volumes of Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck comics.
And it was the latest volume.
And I was like, Oh, you know, that's a perfectly fine gift.
You know, I like these comics.
I'll look forward to digging into this.
Rip it open 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, right?
It was a clue that was pretty much the direct location of my actual present, which was a ColecoVision.
Now.
The ColecoVision was basically the gateway technology between the Atari 2600 and the Nintendo.
You could also say Sega Genesis, something like that.
Well, and there was also Intellivision in there for a while.
Intellivision was kind of at the same time as Atari, along with Odyssey.
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 2600s.
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 that was what wealthy dowagers bought.
Yeah.
Nobody.
Who buys a ColecoVision in this economy, in the economy of the early 80s?
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 he wandered around as that little smurf, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.
Oh, boy.
It was about a 15-second loop.
My parents, I'm sure, regretted that gift greatly.
But when we talked about this topic, it took me 01 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, you got what you wanted.
Steven, two questions for you.
How many ColecoVision controllers did you burn through?
Because those things famously flimsy.
I am glad you brought this up.
The worst thing about 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.
OK, 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?
It's like said it was lame.
So I am a lazy, lazy monster.
And I did not continue it.
That was one tradition I had meant to pass on to my kids.
The other 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 my parents would have sneaked in like the tooth fairy and deposited a gift at the foot of our beds.
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.
I was going to say, cut to Andrew like, I got a pen.
We were a largely secular family, Andrew.
What is going on?
It's like multiple gifts.
I got a stapler.
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.
That's the way that works.
My parents' entire personalities were kind of built around obsession with the pop culture you love.
I was raised by a family that made me very well suited for this job.
Yep.
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 and 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.
Yeah.
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 ideas 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 that's the other reason why I usually got several Christmas presents from my parents.
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.
The Joker.
Holy cow.
It's Batman sold separately and the Wayne Foundation, a crime fighting lab assembly required.
Batman passed the computer station down to the communications center.
There's a Batman trophy room, working elevator, and a bookcase with secret hiding compartments.
Did you pick up, Andrew, that they mentioned the elevator twice, that the elevator takes me down?
And then there's also an elevator.
I'm very excited about the elevator.
All right.
So in the 70s, Mego was this company that made eight-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 the Batcopter, I had it.
The Batcycle, I had it.
The Batmobile, do you even have to ask?
The Mobile Batlab, which was basically a VW van.
It's best not to think about that too hard.
I had it.
The Batcave playset with working bat signal and bat pole and the secret entrance just like in the TV show, didn't have that.
My friend David had that.
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 kind of...
I threw my little seven-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 Batcave.
Right.
Maybe there's a few less snoopy snow cone machines in the world.
And also there was the fact that she had a letter from Santa.
You know physical proof.
That was a close encounter of at least the second kind.
And I thought, I've got to frame that.
You've got to frame that.
So it cuts to two years later, 1977.
I was nine.
I was still, you know...
Roiling over the bat cave fiasco.
Came down the stairs on Christmas morning and there it was.
Four stories of pure bat goodness.
And I urge you all to Google this play set.
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 verisimilitude because it was based on the skyscraper that Batman was actually working out of in the comics, because he had abandoned the Batcave at the start of the 70s.
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.
Wow.
And it was filled with references to the TV show and the comics and I could get lost in that for days.
Oh, I remember.
I think for some reason I've looked at pictures of this before because it's just the Barbie Dreamhouse.
Yep.
Now, did I realize, to your point, Linda, that this thing was basically a re-skinned Malibu Barbie Dreamhouse?
I very much did.
Because they couldn't, 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 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 like how it figures, how it kind of It steers your destiny in some way.
And also, by the way, the thing it represents.
I looked on eBay this morning.
Two to four thousand bucks nowadays.
Oh, dear.
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.
Glenn, buddy, I know you love your parents very, very much.
Yes, I do.
I do look at this and I think buddy, I wish 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.
Wow, the art in this is incredible.
I'm just looking at the... Yeah, it's beautiful.
Isn't it right?
And it's got references 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 Men, a picture of him, for absolutely no reason, who never crossed over with Batman so much.
It's very intricate.
It is.
It is.
Yeah.
It's very of its time, too.
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 slash PCHH.
That brings us to the end of our show.
Andrew Limbaugh, Linda Holmes, Stephen Thompson.
Thanks, pals.
This was fun.
Yeah, thank you.
Thank you.
Thanks, Glenn.
This was really fun.
This episode was produced by Liz Metzger and edited by Jessica Reedy.
And Hello, Come In provides our theme music.
Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.
I'm Glenn Weldon, and we'll see you all tomorrow.
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