Tripping down victory lane

Stains untouched since the fourth quarter of the 20th Century.

As the story goes, my childhood friend Brian LaMay got a Hot Wheels®™© car every time he set the dinner table.

Maybe this is true. Now that I've reconnected with Brian, I'll have to ask.

Until then, I should not discount this story as a ploy my mom used to discourage sloth and promote industry from her seven-year-old.

If so, she picked an extremely effective one. Mine was a Hot Wheels®©-based economy, the cars my currency. I lived for them during two important years of my childhood.

They came out right about the time I would be interested in hot rods and dragsters.The cars were the first thing I remember saving for.

I'd collect the dimes Mrs. Christopher paid next-door neighbor Buddy and me for ridding her sidewalk junipers of fallen leaves. We worked 47 straight days, as I recall, from before sunup in grueling heat in the Sisyphean task of plucking leaves from the prickly plants' poisonous maw — for the princely recompense of a dime.

My toys were well loved.

Seven or eight dimes got me a new car at Uncle Tom's Toys in town; with each car came a little tin badge (Matching Collector's Button®™) cut in the shape of a tire with a picture of the car in the hollow; bend the little tab on the edge and wear the badge on your shirt collar. Why? I don't know.

What I also don't know: How Uncle Tom's Toys got to be the name of a store.

My collection, you can gather, was hard won and small.

Christmas loomed large in this economy. Christmas signaled a windfall. Christmas was bags of unmarked cash, falling out the back of an armored car, except it happened every year at an appointed time, so you knew where to stand when the booty spilled.

Hot Wheels®© products went forth and multiplied on Christmas.

Deeply conflicted, I tell you now that my Christmas miracle was seeing — first through a glass darkly and then in unmistakable psychedelic glow — the great tangle of orange-sherbet colored track already assembled to the assortment of devices that propelled the Hot Wheels™® cars — perpetually, in theory — along that track. I was a very young capitalist tool.

Also I got this, the Popup 12 Car Collector's Case.

All the online auction sites indicate the collector's case was issued in 1967, when I was five, but I couldn't possibly have gotten it then. That was during my I-may-or-may-not-own-Matchbox™®-cars-but-I-have-no-idea-how-many-or-where-they-are-because-I'm-only-five-years-old phase. I'm gonna say this beauty showed up when I was seven and far more mature.

Besides holding cars, the vinyl-covered case opens to reveal a grandstand that pops up, with tabs in front of the grandstand to which you can attach the track, known originally as Hot Strip®™Trak (Google™® "Hot Strip" at your peril).

I attached the track once, maybe, to see how it worked: Not too well. The acrid vinyl popup never really stayed popped up, and wanted to revert to its packaged state, swallowing any attached track.

It still held cars, though. Where they are now, I have no idea. They surely included:

Splittin' Image, designed by Ira Gilford
(Someone's collector pic; my actual car is dim memory)

• Splittin' Image (which was a play on "Spittin' Image," a phrase I'd never heard at the time, so the joke was lost on me)
• Silhouette, with its clear plastic bubble canopy
• Boss Hoss Silver Special, a steroid-enhanced metallic-painted Mustang
• Beatnik Bandit, another bubble canopy car; Hot Wheels™© alone kept the bubble canopy industry alive
• Nitty Gritty Kitty, a souped-up Cougar, my favorite for unknown reasons
• A McLaren M6A, based on the Le Mans-style racer
• (And definitely maybe) not only The Snake but The Mongoose, probably the two most famous funny cars in history; the snake ate its tail on this one — the real funny cars were sponsored by Hot Wheels®©™
  

  

  Beatnik Bandit, designed by Harry Bradley based on real
  car designed by Ed "Big Daddy" Roth
  (Collector's pic)

I did not own:

• The Custom Volkswagen Bug, world's tiniest Hot Wheel®©, easiest to lose
• The Hot Heap, a classic hot rod
• The S'Cool Bus, a yellow bus funny car; the body could be lifted and propped over the chassis
• The Red Baron, a hot rod with a silver German infantry helmet, based on a model, based on a car
• Any of the Indy style cars

Buddy owned most of those and I coveted them, of course. As far as I know, we made no trades. A dime is a dime.

The printing was misregistered, engendering ghostly images
all over the case. Mr. Hamburger Slinger has a huge crowd in
the stands, yet three stools, no waiting.

The cover of my collector's case shows two driverless cars racing side by side just past the grandstand, the sky on fire.

The picture has always puzzled me because I wondered how much the artist knew about Hot Wheels®© when given the assignment.

Though the wheels are faithful to the distinctive five-spoke metallic mag design and the red line along the tread — the hallmark of the early cars — and the track surface is vaguely orange, the cars pictured didn't match the product.


"Here are pictures of the wheels," Mattel® told the artist. "We're still figuring out what the cars look like. Use your imagination."

Billboards, I guess, on a decal affixed to
one side of the cars' compartments,
set quaintly on lattice-work stands.

During my brief love affair with Hot Wheels©®™, I acquired every banked turn, loop, jump, starting gate, finishing gate, lap counter, Super Charger™® (battery operated) and Rod Runner©™(manually operated) perpetual motions devices to push the cars along the track. Set gingerly on wire springs, the Hot Wheels®™© cars were surprisingly fast. We either spent hours building tracks or, getting bored quickly, pushed them around on the kitchen floor.

When the affair ended, my room looked like a city corporation yard, haystacks of track strewn about … raspberry-colored plastic biscuits to join the tracks, scattered by the hundreds … and myriad peripheral devices. All thrown away in one classic I'm-tired-of-asking-you-to-clean-this-room! parental swoop.

The crowd goes wild.

The collector's case alone remains, my memories held bound by the nifty metal snap.

A modest proposal

I hate Christmas.

Can't dance around it anymore, or dull my declaration with $10 words. No point in making people around me wonder why I'm such a jerk (or moreso) during the holidays.

I hate Christmas for what it is — what it probably always has been: A celebration of consumption. Not a celebration; a hyperventilated expectation of consumption, the de facto duty of all Americans (and maybe all the first world).

The economy, somehow, depends on us to buy stuff at Christmas. And buy. Etc.

It is the Mythical Manufacture and Movement of Money, the Emergency Reallocation of Resources, and everything we do during the ever-lengthening season serves it.

Even what we call tradition is really just a whetstone for commerce.

Maybe once Christmas was solely about tradition — but not in my lifetime. Probably not ever.

Many ancient traditions, it turns out — even ones we may hold dearest — aren't ancient at all, but just made up for covert motive.

To my wife's chagrin I'm reading "The Battle for Christmas," an analysis of how America celebrates the holiday, by historian and Pulitzer finalist Stephen Nissenbaum. At first banned by Puritan leaders because it collapsed into drunken riots, Christmas has since become a layered social engineering project promoting family togetherness and homebound pacification, Nissenbaum writes.

In no time the economy hijacked the whole package and ransomed our wallets. We have since been buying things we don't need, with money we don't have, and singing and baking in an attempt to sugarcoat it all.

Once — some of you may recall — this was a spiritual time, and not just for Christians; many religions and philosophies held this time sacred or at least solemn, finding in it a period of rest representing death, a dark cold time of hope for longer, warmer days representing renewal. Many interested parties, Christianity among them, decided this a good season to stick a high holy day.

Whatever was spiritual about this time, though, became the flea on the tail of the big dog.

Witness any Christmastime TV trope. Whenever religious reference arises in any show, whenever Christ is born in a manager — in a school play, say — Santa is soon sure to follow, distributing gifts. I've done my hour with Jesus, now gimme my "Call of Duty: Black Ops."

The farce has no limits. One ludicrous violation soon follows the next. Christmas shopping now begins officially on Thanksgiving —Black Thursday! — and will eventually start even earlier; thousands camp out at stores, pushing, shoving, yelling, cursing, fighting in gratitude for the chance to buy. Talk about tradition.

Jon Stewart is right. It's not a war on Christmas. Christmas is warring on us, swallowing up other holidays.

The Hallmark Channel, hijacker of our emotional consumption, rolled out the Christmas movies long before that. You can find radio stations playing Christmas carols year 'round. TV commercials mock the gifts we give, unless they're the cool gifts the TV commercials sell. Only cool parents buy kids cool gifts. We are supposed to believe this how we are supposed to behave.

Car makers seriously suggest you buy someone a new sedan for Christmas. A local dealership even declared last week in a commercial:

"Nothing will give you more holiday joy than driving a 2013 Audi A3."

Read it again. Nothing? Even under the crushing overhead, bled by razor-thin margins and ruthless competition, an auto dealer should be able to taste the bile in that season's greeting.

But we sally forth, celebrating harder and louder, as if to drown out the siren song of the shopping malls, and the true nature of this time.

I say, enough. 

Here's my modest proposal: Skip it. Have Christmas every other year. Give it distance so we can miss it and welcome its return with sincere remembrance. Give Christmas a rest. Make it official, issue a decree.

Unlike Jonathan Swift's modest proposal, no children will be eaten in mine. Nor is mine satire.

Here's what will probably happen when Christmas takes a holiday:

• A lot of people will still have Christmas, by which I mean buy and buy, and so be it. I'm not against shopping, just buying for buying's sake. More, relieved of the duty, will spread their purchases throughout the year as needed.
• A lot of people will still worship, and that's all right; it'll feel illicit and rebellious and dangerous, just like the old days. I'm not stomping on religion, just on consuming. In fact, worship may deepen; people will find again the quiet space in which to consider the faiths in which they were raised or have gathered up in their lives
  
  I admire Kwanzaa, for example, a holiday Maulana Karenga created 46 years ago from African traditions, promoting community and individual ideals. More power to those who celebrate it. But the holiday takes place the week after Christmas, and if it has any real chance of worthy consideration among communities, it needs distance from our overriding urge to have things.
• The divide will narrow — the one between those who have the cash to keep up with Christmas consumption and those who don't but keep up anyway, because no one is going to tell my child doesn't deserve what your child is getting.
• Depression will lift among the people who see the holiday for what it really is, and can't make it go away. They will have peace.
• The economy will not sputter.
• We'll remember that veterans and  families without homes shiver and starve and get sick and hide out in the woods during the rest of the year, too, not just Christmas.
• After a two-year absence, we may buy even more. But I bet we do almost everything but.

You're right, I'm a big fat hypocrite. I am, as a matter of fact, proposing a last-one-in-bar-the-door policy. I did as a child succumb to the nervous elation of peering into the darkness of an early Christmas morning to see, as my eyes adjusted, a mountain of sherbet-colored Hot Wheels™® track, with loops and ramps, already assembled and ready to play, and six new cars to run on the track.

I loved it with a child's skepticism. I wasn't a bad kid, by any means, but I certainly wasn't good enough to merit this cascade of toys (oh, the Hot Wheels®© weren't all!) that Santa brought, so many I couldn't — and didn't — appreciate them all, or even a little.

I'm not denying that for kids to come. Maybe my proposal will elevate that feeling, so the mountain of toys every two years becomes all the more grand; certainly we'd be able to save up for it every two years. Or maybe my proposal will elevates kids instead; absent the constant commercial drumbeat, maybe kids will want less, appreciate more what they get.

It's a tough sell (so to speak), I know. I'm having enough trouble convincing my family that Thanksgiving is not about turkey, is not about a meal that takes eight hours to make and 30 minutes to eat. Thanksgiving can be grilled cheese or take-out chicken and a family walk in a park. Or an afternoon with friends. Or coats for the family in the woods. It's about giving thanks, not getting stuffed.

There's always next year.