I just found myself putting this in my blog, but I thought I'd throw it 
open for discussion here.

You know you're old when Christmas now provokes feelings of dread rather 
than excitement and joy. I've been pondering on exactly why that is, and 
I think I've figured out at least part of the reason: kids are so much 
easier to please.

Think about this for a moment. You're 4 years old. Somebody gives you a 
present. You unwrap it, and it's a toy dinosaur with flashing eyes.

Now, the adults in the room realise that this is just a lump of plastic 
with a pair of LEDs strapped to it. It probably cost about 0.02p to 


But *you* don't even care. It's a dinosaur! It is, by definition, 
FRICKIN' AWESOME! This is, like, the coolest thing EVER! You spend the 
next four hours driving everybody in the building insane by waving this 
flashing dinosaur at them with a crazed look of uncontrollable glee on 
your face. (At least, until the battery runs out. And in about 4 months' 
time, you'll be bored of it, and no doubt the left foot has snapped off...)

When you're a kid, a silly lump of plastic with flashing LEDs on it is, 
like, the most amazing thing imaginable. Deciding what you want for 
Christmas is hard because there's just such an absurdly huge zoo of 
possibilities to choose from, all of roughly similar awesomness. And 
what are you going to give your little sister for Christmas this year? 
Gee, where the hell do I even START with that?! So many options!

Let's sit down and enumerate our options here for a moment. There are 
dinosaurs, fire trucks and robots with flashing lights and silly sound 
effects. There are electric trains and cars. There's Spiragraph and 
Etch-A-Sketch. Lego, Maccano, Construx. There are sets of brightly 
coloured pens, crayons and pencils, even sparkly ones, or ones that glow 
in the dark. One year I got pencils that turn into watercolours when 
wet. There are toy (and not so toy) musical instruments. There are 
short-range radios and pretend computers.

One year, we all got these gizmos that consist of a metal frame and 
several boxes of plastic beads. You sprinkle the beads into the gaps in 
the frame according to taste, and put the thing in the oven. The plastic 
melts, and when it cools again you have a little stained "glass" window.

Another year, we got little plastic pegs that fit into a peg board. You 
then iron the pegs, and they melt and stick together. Some of them had 
bright neon colours, others glowed in the dark.

Another year, we got special paper that you draw on, and then bake in 
the oven. The paper (really a kind of plastic) shrinks and becomes 
keyrings or fridge magnets. A different year, we got a kind of 
plastercine that sets rock hard in the oven.

And let's not forget, when you're a kid, if somebody buys you a video 
about volcanoes or dinosaurs (or volcanoes AND dinosaurs!), you're happy 
for hours!

One year, I got a chemistry set for Christmas. I mean, I guess it 
doesn't really "do" a lot... but it's a *chemistry set*!! How 
uncontrollably awesome is that?! It has *chemicals* in it! :-D

And then there's all the crazy little games we used to play. Stuff like 
Averlanch, where you have different coloured marbles balanced on a grid 
of levers, and you're supposed to tip out your opponent's marbles but 
not knock out your own. Or a puzzle game somewhat similar to dominos, 
but with square cards each bearing four symbols. Buy placing one of your 
cards onto an existing card, you get more points the more symbols you match.

Kids are just so easy to please. (Any parents reading this can stop 
laughing now. :-P ) Something as simple a remote controlled card is 
endless ours of fun.

Now, have a think about this: As an adult, what the hell is *fun* 
anymore? I'm struggling to think of anything. (Which probably just tells 
you how fun my life currently is...) Even assuming you can think of a 
few things, how many of these things require "things"? I mean, dancing 
the night away can be quite fun, but you don't *need* anything special 
to do that, just yourself and a suitable place to go. There's nothing 
that you can wrap up in a box. (Except perhaps a ticket.)

So what *the hell* do you get an adult for Christmas? What do you ask to 
receive? Let's face it, if you want something and it's cheap, you've 
probably already bought it for yourself by now. So that leaves... stuff 
that's so expensive that nobody else can afford it either. (And possibly 
nobody else even understands what the hell it is - especially if you 
happen to be a computer nerd or a rock climbing enthusiast or any other 
sort of unusual technical pasute.)

And so, it seems, when you're an adult, it's extremely difficult to know 
what to buy (or just to be able to buy) for anybody else, and it's 
difficult to imagine that anything anybody else is going to buy for you 
will actually be more exciting then a new wooly jumper.




Hmm, that's kind of sad actually. How about something more uplifting?

So what's the best gift you ever received as a kid? Can you actually 
*remember* back when driving a plastic car with flashing lights on it 
seemed like the pinacle of enjoyment? What neat stuff did you get?

I've never actually seen Maccano (though I gather it's popular) and I 
never had much Lego, but one year myself and my (step)siblings received 
a truckload of Contrux. The lot of us, the entire family, literally 
spent hours and hours constructing huge structures which we then had to 
take apart because they were simply too big to keep anywhere. But it was 
great! Sometimes you built small stuff by yourself, sometimes you 
followed the instructions with your siblings to construct huge 
structures. And the system included a control box which could work 
flashing lights and a few small electric motors, so you could (for 
example) make a helicopter with spinning rotors. It was great! (Until 
people started breaking all the bits... KEITH! >:-[ ) We even had a 
folding tool chest which we used to store all the pieces - beams, knots, 
cogs, drive shafts, deck plates...

I think I already mentioned the chemistry set. That one requires a lot 
of supervision. While it doesn't contain anything deadly toxic, I'm 
guessing that copper sulfate and cobalt chloride won't do you a lot of 
good. There are instructions in the manual that describe the production 
of ammonia gas, elemental chlorine gas, and mild explosives. The kit 
also contains magnesium, who's main claim to fame is that it burns 
stupidly brightly. Arguably the most astonishing thing in the kit is the 
meths burner. I've never seen anything like it. You take a wick, SET IT 
ON FIRE, and when you put it out, it's not burnt. Burning bush, eat your 
heart out!! (Still, having your child play with fire is... hazardous?)

I also got more than one electronics kit. Now, granted, to some kids 
that would probably be an increadibly boring thing. You can follow the 
instructions, which are basically huge tables of numbers, and it 
requires craploads of wiring to actually make anything. And when you've 
done it, in spite of the electrical engineers' best efforts, the results 
are less than spectacular - various kinds of sounds and flashing lights 
as you press the assorted buttons. Possibly the most amusing one is the 
"electronic birthday cake", where 5 LEDs light up, and then sequentially 
go out as you blow into the speaker (which acts as a kind of inefficient 
microphone and detects the windsound). But to me, it was great! I spent 
endless years experimenting with it. It's how I first came to understand 
how assorted electronic components work, including logic gates and 
flip-flops. (I will admit, however, that I still have NO FREAKING IDEA 
how an oscilator works, or why it must always contain 63,756,234 
seperate resistors connected apparently at random...)

As for the best present *ever*... Well it could be when one Christmas, 
everybody around me unwrapped RC cars or cuddly toys, and I unwrapped A 
FRIGGIN AMIGA 1200! As in, like, an ACTUAL COMPUTER. I almost fell out 
of my chair. I actually left guilty for getting a present so many 
billion times better than everybody else. I was actually holding in my 
hands the most powerful computer in the entire building. And it was 
mine. All MINE! First computer I ever owned... and I still have it, by 


Actually, there is one present I got which was even better. Not for 
Christmas, but for my 18th birthday. My mother bought me a Yamaha AN1x 
digital synthesizer. I know exactly what it cost, because I spent the 
previous three months more or less *living* in the shop that sold it, 

sweet-talked my mother into buying it. It still sits in my bedroom next 
to my computer, and I use it almost every single day of my life. Indeed, 
learning the Widor Toccata would hardly have been possible without a 
keyboard to practice on. (In solomn truth, I don't use its synthesis 

that [not that that's the price *I* paid]. But it's how I started with 
synthesizers.)

So there you have it!

Other toys I never owned buy did get to look at... Well, Etch-A-Sketch 
gets boring pretty rapidly. Spiragraph is much more fun, but ever 
actually works anywhere near as perfectly as they how on the box. There 
are billions of possible combinations you can draw, but actually they 
all end up looking quite similar. And the pieces don't really work 
terribly well, to be honest.

One guy had a gizmo called Dr Spell or something. It had several modes, 
including where it would read out a word and you're supposed to type it 
in. Trouble is, it would burble something like "fiyown", and you'd be 
like "wuh? That's not even a WORD!"

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