1977: The Year My Brother Ruined Christmas

Oh, we were crazy for those early videogames in my house growing up. We were one of the first homes to have Pong, and my older brother Chris was masterful on the knobs. The guy was a champ and I couldn’t beat him, but it was still fun to play all day, because in the Golden Age of Video Games all this junk was brand new and so cool.

Star Wars had been released that year and every kid was tech-happy. We had to have all the latest gadgetry and digital toys that flooded the market every holiday season, but one year in particular stands out in my memory…and alas, not for a very happy reason.

It was the year that Chris made my mom cry. And it all goes back to this stupid little red diode handheld digital football game by Mattel.

The idea behind this game was simple – there were three rows of action on the field, about nine diode sections long. At any given point, you had to scramble your blip past the opponent blips that randomly zig-zagged back and forth around the ‘field’. If you ran into them, you were tackled. Easy cheesy, but addictive as hell when we were tots. Mom knew that Chris wanted one very badly for Christmas, and she went and bought one for him, stashed it high on the shelf in her walk-in closet.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out where mom was hiding the Christmas goods; just an hour or so of snooping while Mom was next door at the neighbors was all he needed to locate the loot and find out who was getting what. I’m sure he was delighted to find the football game in the bag.

Now most kids will be plenty happy when they snoop out their presents and know in advance what Xmas day will deliver. This wasn’t enough for him—he had the nerve to open it and play with it. Worse still, he closed the box back up and took it to his room to play it there. And then, of course, it was too much fun to return it to the box immediately.

Bear in mind, this is well before ADD was diagnosed, so don’t blame him too much for forgetting that he had ill-gotten booty stashed in his room. He played it off like a champ after Mom discovered it under his bed when she was cleaning up the next day. “Oh, that’s Timmy’s, he lent it to me”, he lied through his teeth. Mom, of course, bought every word and felt quite pleased that he would soon have one of his very own.

The inevitable happened. Come Christmas morning, Chris awoke to the thump and stammer of our furious Mother racing up the stairs to cry at him that he had ruined Christmas. Of course he’d never returned it by that point; when Mom had gone to wrap it, she noted how light the box was. She checked it out and instantly realized Chris’ deception and betrayal.

Oh, the humanity!